This meeting focuses on a province with enormous potential for fuels and minerals. Oil reserves approach 10% of the total oil already produced in the rest of the country. Estimated coal resources could store a thousand times the 70-80 quads of energy the U.S. uses every year. Potential yields of silver, lead, and zinc range from 10 to 100% of the amounts produced domestically since the middle of the 19th century. Prospects for copper are also large.

The province is dominated by the east-trending Brooks Range, whose structures formed during the late Mesozoic Brookian orogeny and are now being shortened longitudinally. Flanking basins succeeded the uplift; the northern one is bounded by a passive continental margin. Early in the orogeny, a relatively thin early Paleozoic through Jurassic megasequence of clastic-wedge, carbonate, and siliceous sediments was telescoped into a fivefold stacking of allochthons and beneath allochthons of volcanic and mafic-ultramafic rocks. The greater than 500-km breadth of sialic crust that had underlain the allochthons disappeared. At about the same time, the Arctic Ocean basin replaced the northern provenance. A mid-Paleozoic sialic source area on the opposite margin of the megasequence disappeared y the end of the Carboniferous and near the beginning of siliceous deposition. Basement beneath the North Slope part of the mega-sequence was created when the Devonian Ellesmerian orogeny added to the crust the late Precambrian to early Paleozoic clastic, carbonate, and volcanic rocks of an older megasequence.

The northern successor basin accumulated large amounts of coal. Truncation and sealing of potential reservoir rocks on replacement of the northern landmass led to huge pools of hydrocarbons. Late Paleozoic rocks in the lowest allochthon host stratabound base-metal deposits. A narrow belt of reportedly Devonian shallow-seated felsic rocks contain deposits of copper.

John Maher foresaw the benefits that the first North Slope seminar has provided. That precedent and developments during the past 15 years promise similar benefits from this meeting.

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