18th U.S. Oil Shale Symposium, Grand Junction, Colorado, April 1985
Author: T. W. Gulliver (AAI)
Dissolution of salts in the Piceance Creek Basin oil shales has lead to considerable collapse. Fracture systems affecting dissolution at depth show visible lineaments. Remote sensing, hand in hand with drill hole data, allows interpretation of solution collapse and modeling of rock quality and hydrology in the leached zone and overlying strata. In this study, video-enhanced Landsat imagery is used to relate relic salt bulges in a single zone to lineaments in the central basin. Fractures indicated by linear gulches and lineaments bounding salt in bulges are suggested to have localized solution collapse.
