ABSTRACT: Geologic History of the Anadarko Basin, Western Oklahoma, North Texas Panhandle, and Southwestern Kansas

J. K. Pitman, R. C. Burruss, T. S. Dyman, R. M. Flores, J. R. Hatch, M. Henry, C. W. Keighin, W. J. Perry, Jr., R. M. Pollastro, J. E. Repetski, R. L. Reynolds, D. D. Rice, R. L. Robbins, J. W. Schmoker

The deep Anadarko basin in western Oklahoma, the north Texas panhandle, and southwestern Kansas is a major hydrocarbon-bearing province in the Mid-Continent that has had a complex depositional and structural history. From the Late Cambrian through Early Mississippian, thick sequences of shallow-marine carbonate rocks, organic-rich shale, and sandstone were deposited in a broad epicontinental sea that extended across the southern Mid-Continent. This sea formed an embayment that opened to the southeast into the proto-Tethys ocean. During the Pennsylvanian, the Anadarko basin formed, in its approximate present configuration, along the northern shelf of the older southern Oklahoma trough. Uplift of the Amarillo-Wichita Mountains and related structural blocks caused basin down arping by thrust or transpressional loading. Deposition of coarse clastic sediment along mountain fronts accompanied Pennsylvanian and Permian deformation. This coarse sediment graded basinward into well-dated marine sandstone, shale, and limestone, allowing the timing of deformation to be precisely determined. In the basin interior, fault-bounded beheaded folds formed islands that were surrounded by coarse clastic wedges that became traps for hydrocarbons. Typically these fault-bounded folds produced as much as 2 km of structural relief; however, only a few hundred meters of topographic relief probably existed at any one time. Likewise, although the cumulative vertical component of fault separation along the Wichita fault system may have exceeded 12 km, topographic relief at any one tim was probably less than 1000 m.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #91003©1990 AAPG Annual Convention, San Francisco, California, June 3-6, 1990