Abstract: Surface and Subsurface Features of the Late Pleistocene Beaumont Formation as Studied in a Proposed Supercollider Site in Liberty and Hardin Counties, Southeastern Texas
Saul Aronow
In 1987 an area in Hardin and Liberty counties in southeastern Texas was a much-studied candidate site for the ill-fated Supercollider. The site is on the outcrop of the late Pleistocene Beaumont Formation, which locally was deposited by a sequence of meandering, avulsing, suspended-load, paleo-Trinity River courses, now preserved as a well to poorly defined depositional topography. Test holes in meander-belt ridges showed that channel and point bar silty fine to very fine sands are almost everywhere covered by approximately 10 to 40 ft (~3-12 m) of CH and CL overbank clays. Sand bodies where completely penetrated are approximately 20 to 50 ft (~6-15 m) thick. Pedogenic calcareous deposits and slickensides at depths well below any influence by present-day surface processes are probabl parts of lower horizons of truncated now-buried soils generated during the accumulation of the Beaumont, or on the surface of the underlying Lissie Formation. The relationship of one of the paleo-meander belts to the uplifted topographic surface of the Hull salt dome suggests that the rise of the surface postdated the deposition of the Beaumont.
AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90983©1994 GCAGS and Gulf Coast SEPM 44th Annual Meeting, Austin, Texas, October 6-7, 1994