Hexagon Mining Division Office

In Arizona, and across the western US, wildfires have increased in size and severity and, due to invasive vegetation and drought, have encroached into ecosystems that historically did not sustain large, high severity fires (e.g., the Sonoran Desert, the Pacific NW).  Concurrent, increased development into the wildland-urban interface (WUI), where the built and natural environments...

 A long history of fluid-rock interaction in the Paradox Basin has resulted in geologically diverse products caused by a range of fluid sources and drivers. The La Sal district is an example within the basin of a locus of fluid systems that formed U(-V) and Cu(-Ag) deposits, salt wall-proximal bleaching, hydrocarbon-induced pyritization, and carbonate-stable alteration....

Big Sandy Valley in northwestern Arizona is a large, exceptionally well-exposed extensional basin with complex Proterozoic bedrock, multiple Laramide porphyry stocks, the Miocene Kaiser Spring volcanic field, two generations of Miocene to Pliocene basin fill, interbedded rock-avalanche deposits, and middle Miocene and younger faults. Systematic geologic mapping in this basin was initially motivated by several...

Cenozoic extension in the western United States occurred within two iconic domains: the Basin and Range and Rio Grande rift. These provinces merge in southern New Mexico to form an interconnected zone of extension, although the existence, location, and nature of the boundary between the two provinces are uncertain. In southern New Mexico, existing thermochronologic,...

The formation of the Grand Canyon is a long-standing controversial topic in geology. The literature is littered with hypotheses and conjecture. A river that has cut a canyon through a topographic bedrock highland, as the Colorado River does through the Kaibab Plateau, is termed a transverse drainage. Four mechanisms have been proposed to explain the...