ON THE NEED FOR A BIG GEOSCIENTIFIC STUDY IN THE SOUTH-CENTRAL REGION

The region encompassed by the five US states of the GSA South-Central Section hosts more geoscientists and geoscience-related companies than anywhere else in the US but there is much to learn about how the crust of this region formed and evolved. We need to start building communities of academic scientists, industry, and students to develop a 21^st-century agenda for studying crustal scale geoscientific problems in this region. Such an effort should be interdisciplinary and focus on addressing a major problem that requires integrated geophysical and geological approaches to solve it. These approaches should include - but not be limited to - regional 2D seismic reflection profiling to delimit a smaller area for 3D seismic imaging and drilling – including coring and logging – into basement. The community should determine what problem should be addressed first. We here suggest 6 important geoscientific problems in the region to start this discussion:

1. Location and nature of the buried Grenville (~1.1 Ga) deformation front in central Texas
2. Age and nature of buried Neoproterozoic (?) (1000-540 Ma) sediments of the Hardeman Basin in NE Texas
3. Age and nature of Sabine uplift crust (Gondwana orphan)
4. Nature of the buried Ouachita overthrust between Dallas and Austin and the extent to which Pennsylvanian thrusts were reactivated in Late Mesozoic as normal faults to accommodate the opening of the Gulf of Mexico and East Texas Basin
5. Composition of crust flooring the East Texas Basin
6. Nature of crust beneath the Marathon-Permian Basin and structure of the Marathon-Permian Basin thrust

In each case, the paramount question is the age and nature of basement but this does not diminish the value of information obtained by studying cores of overlying sediments and fluids. Given continued reductions in federal funding for science, launching a scientific initiative on this scale will require joint industry-university funding and involvement to move forward, and a new model of industry-university interaction will need to be developed. Fortunately, all of these unresolved problems have implications for 21^st century hydrocarbon exploration in and around the region. Such a project would not only be designed to address key geoscientific questions, but it should be optimized to involve and train students at different levels across disciplines.