Middle-upper Miocene depositional sequences of offshore Texas represent the last regionally significant influx of terrigenous elastic sediments into the western Gulf Coast Basin.

The Permian Spraberry Trend, once regarded as the world's largest uneconomic oil field, is a prime candidate for reserve growth through extended conventional recovery. More than 9.4 billion barrels (Bbbl) of oil was discovered in the trend, which is part of a giant oil play (10.5 Bbbl of in-place oil) that produces from submarine fan reservoirs of the Spraberry and Dean Formations in the Midland Basin, West Texas.

The interaction of geomorphic and ground-water processes has produced the Caprock Escarpmentthat bounds the eastern margin of the Southern High Plains in the Texas Panhandle. Spring sapping,slumping, and piping at the surface and salt dissolution in the subsurface are some of the many erosionalprocesses affecting the escarpment.Substantial thicknesses of bedded Permian salt (halite) have been dissolved from the Salado, SevenRivers, San Andres, and Glorieta Formations beneath the Caprock Escarpment and the Rolling Plains,east of the escarpment.

The manner in which sedimentary overburden accumulates significantly influences the growth of syndepositional salt structures. To determine the general principles of this influence for application to specific instances in nature, we carried out 16 experiments using scaled centrifuged models to simulate the effect of variable sedimentary loading on the geometry, kinematics, and dynamics of syndepositional salt structures. This topic has been almost entirely ignored in both physical and mathematical modeling of salt structures.The rheology of four modeling materials was determined.