Like the early Spanish explorers who first saw Palo Duro Canyon, today's visitor is likely to view the impressive canyon with surprise and awe.
Sulfur, along with salt, coal, and limestone, is one of the basic raw materials of the chemical industry. A nation’s per capita sulfur consumption is a reliable index to its chemical production and a rough index to its standard of living.
The rocks exposed in the Austin West quadrangle are Cretaceous marine limestones and clays and Quaternary alluvial deposits. The Cretaceous rocks dip gently eastward and are broken by one large (Mount Bonnell) fault and numerous small, northeast-trending faults comprising the Balcones fault zone.
Virgil and lower Wolfcamp rocks on the Eastern Shelf in North-central Texas are composed of several intergradational depositional systems comprising 1,200 to 1,500 feet of off-lapping, predominantly terrigenous sediments.