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The Krebs Formation (Middle Pennsylvanian-Desmoinesian) forms the lower portion of the Cherokee Group in the Cherokee basin of southeastern Kansas. The Krebs Formation near its outcrop in Cherokee and Crawford Counties consists of 78% shale and mudstone, 18% sandstone and siltstone, 3% coal, and 1% limestone, comprising a total thickness of 120 to 220 ft (37 to 67 m). Integration of data from continuous cores, outcrops, and geophysical logs provides a detailed stratigraphic framework and facilitates interpretation of depositional environments. Coal beds and associated seat-rock units, some having an areal extent of several thousand square miles, provide excellent stratigraphic marker beds for correlation of discontinuous reservoir sandstones. Radioactive dark-gray shale units and argi laceous limestone units often overlie coal beds and may be equally widespread.

Net-sandstone isolith maps reveal the presence of a lobate deltaic complex in southwestern Missouri, characterized by both stacking and offset of major sandstone bodies. Coal beds commonly cap upward-coarsening, mud-dominated sequences consisting of dark-gray shale with occasional argillaceous limestones overlain by lenticular-bedded shale or wavy-bedded siltstones. This vertical transition of lithofacies is interpreted to result from the progradational infilling of large interdistributary bays. Coarsening-upward sandstone sequences--consisting of lenticular-bedded shale grading upward into wavy-bedded siltstone, flaser-bedded sandstone, and rippled or cross-bedded sandstone--represent distributary mouth-bar or crevasse-splay deposits. Fining-upward sequences--composed of a basal scou surface overlain by mud-clast conglomerates, large-scale cross-bedded sandstone, and rippled or flaser-bedded sandstone--are interpreted to be channel-fill or point-bar deposits.

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