The Bluejacket/Bartlesville Sandstones, Some Problems

Roderick Tillman1

¹Consultant

The Bartlesville Sandstone is one of Oklahoma’s most prolific reservoirs and has been equated to the Bluejacket Sandstone in outcrop. The Bluejacket type section is in northeastern Oklahoma’s Craig County, just south of the Kansas line. Several workers, including Glenn Cole, have posed questions pertaining to the probable miscorrelations of the Bluejacket and the Bartlesville Sandstones. A number of the problems are related to the Bluejacket type section: They are: (1) A portion of the area of Timber Hill on which the type section is described appears on the published Craig County geologic map as Chelsea(Red Fork) Sandstone. (2) The Timber Hill type section (correctly located) may be a compound valley fill in which the Chelsea (or Taft) sandstones are incised into an earlier Bluejacket valley-fill sandstone. (3) The quarter section location given for the type section is not the thick fluvial deposit of the larger area of Timber Hill. Instead, there are two relatively-thin shallow-marine to brackish Dickson sandstones. Correlations from Oklahoma to Kansas also present problems: (1) The Bluejacket is correlated in Kansas with not one, but three “stacked” sandstones. (2) The Doneley Limestone (the uppermost of the “Brown” limes) is a good regional marker bed slightly below the Bluejacket in NE Oklahoma. However in southern Kansas the Oklahoma Doneley is miscorrelated with the much younger Seville Limestone.

Current investigations using cores and core-gamma logs correlated with nearby subsurface logs suggests that the Bluejacket type-section outcrop is not a Bartlesville Sandstone equivalent but instead a younger sandstone.

AAPG Search and Discover Article #90097 © 2009 Tulsa Geological Society, Tulsa, Oklahoma

 

 

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