Barrier islands along the Texas Coastal Zone are part of a complex and dynamic system represented by many distinct yet interrelated environments affected by a variety of resources, natural processes, climatic conditions, and human activities. Because of the increasing realization that island resources are extremely important both as natural systems and as valuable recreational areas, the necessity of understanding their complexities and how man and his activities interact with them becomes more and more urgent.

Land and water resources have been analyzed in the Corpus Christi area--Aransas, Nueces, Refugio, and San Patricio Counties along the central Texas coast. The city and port of Corpus Christi compose the largest metropolitan center in the area. This report analyzes the types, extent, and distribution of land and water resources in the Corpus Christi area.

Tertiary strata of the Texas Gulf Coast comprise a number of terrigenous depositional wedges, some of which thicken abruptly at their downdip ends as a result of contemporaneous movement of growth faults and underlying salt.

The Washita Group in North-Central Texas and southeastern Oklahoma consists of up to 114 m of intercalated shale, limestone, and sandstone that accumulated in the shallow, epicontinental sea of the East Texas Basin. The Ouachita-Arbuckle Mountains to the north supplied terrigenous sediments, and the Central Texas platform to the south was a site of carbonate deposition leeward of the shelf margin of the Stuart City trend. Eleven lithofacies of the Washita were deposited within a repeatedly subsiding shelf basin that received an intermittent supply of terrigenous sediment.