COLLECTION OF HIGH-QUALITY GEOLOGIC CORES BY NORTH CAROLINA GEOLOGICAL SURVEY AND U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY DRILLERS, SOUTHEAST ATLANTIC COASTAL PLAIN, NORTH CAROLINA

This talk honors a 20 year legacy of coring on the Atlantic Coastal Plain of North Carolina by drillers who served either the North Carolina Geological Survey or the U.S. Geological Survey in the capacity of collecting high-quality stratigraphic data for a variety of state and federal projects. As a Coastal Plain geologist who previously worked at the Virginia Survey and the Georgia Geologic Survey, I am long familiar with the USGS drilling crew, starting with Eugene Cobbs, the elder (Big Gene Cobbs). Little Gene Cobbs (the younger) was the principal driller in NC when the five deep coreholes were drilled on our Coastal Plain, with assistance from Jeff Grey and others. For that project about 5000 ft of high-quality core was collected. This data set has provided the bases for establishing a sequence stratigraphic framework for the Cretaceous of North Carolina.

Until its elimination in 2013, the NC Division of Water Quality’s (DWQ) drilling program included a drilling supervisor, a team of 6 drillers, six drill rigs, and a field station at Kinston, NC. Starting in 1999 and ending in 2008, various rigs and drilling crews were assigned to me by the DWQ to support stratigraphic investigations for Non-Point Source Grants from the Environmental Protection Agency. In the Neuse River Basin, a small-scale, detailed subsurface analysis at the Lizzie Research Station was expanded to the scale of the Little Contentnea Creek Watershed, and then to the basinwide-scale. During these studies, Tim Hill served as drilling supervisor, and drillers Billy Casper, Tom King, Dennis Foyles, Jesse Martin, and others worked to collect high-quality core samples for the NCGS. By 2011, mapping combined with subsurface analysis was supported by STATEMAP, and cores were collected with the Geoprobe. Billy Casper became the drilling supervisor, with Dennis Foyles and Joseph Bailey, acting as the main drillers. After the DWQ’s drilling program was eliminated, the NCGS acquired the Geoprobe in 2016, and hired Dennis Foyles part-time to continue coring for STATEMAP and the new USGS Earth MRI mapping project. Since 1999, the NC drilling crew collected 15,000 ft of high-quality core to support mapping and stratigraphic projects geared to characterizing the Quaternary, and complementing the 5000 ft collected by US Geological Survey drillers.