The Wind River Basin is a large Laramide (Late Cretaceous through Eocene) structural and sedimentary basin that encompasses about 7,400 square miles in central Wyoming (fig. 1). The basin is bounded by the Washakie Range and Owl Creek and southern Bighorn Mountains on the north, the Casper arch on the east, the Granite Mountains on the south, and Wind River Range on the west (figs. 1). Many important conventional and unconventional oil and gas resources have been discovered and produced from reservoirs ranging from Mississippian through Tertiary in age (Keefer, 1969; Fox and Dolton, 1989, 1996; De Bruin, 1993; Johnson and others, 1996, 2007). It has been suggested by numerous authors including: Keefer, 1969; Meissner and others, 1984; Fox and Dolton, 1989, 1996; Johnson and Rice, 1993; Nuccio and others, 1996; and Schelling and Wavrek, 1999, 2001: that various Upper Cretaceous marine shales are the principal hydrocarbon source rocks for many of these accumulations. With new drilling and well completion technologies, equivalent marine source rock intervals, in particular the Niobrara Formation, are now important continuous (unconventional) shale gas and shale oil objectives in other Rocky Mountain basins ((Matthews, 2011; Sonnenberg, 2011; Williams and Lyle, 2011; Durham, 2012a,b, 2013; Taylor and Sonnenberg, 2014; and Hawkins, 2016). In the Wind River Basin the Niobrara is represented by shales, calcareous shales, marls, siltstones, and sandstones in the lower shaly member of the Upper Cretaceous Cody Shale (Finn, 2017) (fig. 2). Please see supplemental information for associated references. Selected figures have also been included to help describe this data release. These figures are provided in pdf and jpg format. These include: Fig. 1_Rocky Mountain basins.pdf/jpg. Map of Rocky Mountain region showing locations of Laramide sedimentary and structural basins and intervening uplifts.
Fig. 2_Regional Cretaceous X section.pdf/jpg. Regional east-west stratigraphic cross section of Cretaceous rocks in the Wind River Basin.
Each modified from Finn (2017).