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28-505: The Rogers–Post Site , located on the North Slope of the U.S. state of Alaska , is the location of a plane crash that killed humorist Will Rogers and aviator Wiley Post on August 15, 1935, during an aerial tour of Alaska . It is about 11 miles (18 km) southwest of Utqiaġvik , on the north side of Walakpa Bay near the mouth of the Walakpa River . The flight was described by

56-588: Is 1000 km long, 600 km at its widest, and covers a total area of 240,000 km . The ANS is broken into three provinces the Brooks Range , the Northern Foothills, and the Coastal Plain. The foothills province has severe to gently deformed rock. The southern edge, closest to the Brooks Range , consists of folded and faulted Lower Cretaceous deposits. This region is home to the deepest section of

84-566: Is a foreland basin located on the northern edge of the Brooks Range . The Alaska North Slope is bounded on the north by the Beaufort Sea and runs from the Canadian border to the maritime boundary with Russia in the west. The western edge extends into the Chukchi Sea and Chukchi platform where the basin is at its widest. As the basin moves east it narrows towards the Canadian border. The basin

112-569: Is a carbonate dominated formation that has great reservoir potential as well as possible sourcing layers. The most important and actively producing formation is the Sadlerochit . It is a sandstone dominated reservoir that the Prudhoe Bay field gets the most hydrocarbon production from. The Beaufortian Sequence was deposited from the Jurassic to Lower Cretaceous . This sequence of deposition

140-495: Is dominated by shale and consists of syn-rift deposits supplied by local erosion . There are multiple unconformities present throughout this sequence. The most important is the Lower Cretaceous Unconformity (LCU). The LCU is an important migration pathway for regional hydrocarbons and is capped by Cretaceous mudstones that act as a stratigraphic trap . The most important source rock formations found in

168-528: Is more slender and almost 10 feet (3 m) taller than the first monument. It was built by then 72-year-old Jesse Stubbs (November 30, 1879 – March 14, 1960), who claimed to be a childhood friend of Rogers and arrived in Anchorage in summer 1953 intending to walk from there to Barrow, only getting as far as Fairbanks where he, and his dog Quacco, caught a plane flight for the remainder of the journey. The Stubbs monument memorializes not only Rogers and Post, but also

196-657: The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge . The entire coastal plain of Alaska has tremendous ecological importance with the densest concentration of birds in the Arctic. Under the North Slope is an ancient seabed, which now contains large amounts of petroleum . Within the North Slope, there is a geological feature called the Barrow Arch — a belt of the kind of rock known to be able to serve as a trap for oil. It runs from

224-501: The Associated Press as prelude to a planned Trans-Siberian flight to Moscow. The pair were flying from Fairbanks to Barrow (modern-day Utqiaġvik ) when they encountered fog and low visibility. Locating a hole in the fog at Walakpa Bay, they landed. They spent some time with a small party of Alaska Natives and received directions for the short distance remaining to Barrow. They were barely airborne, around 50 feet (15 m), when

252-661: The Cretaceous by extreme subsidence that resulted from the Brooks Range Orogeny . The ANS foreland basin was broken down into three depositional and tectonic sequences that define the deposits and structure of the basin. From the Mississippian to Jurassic a carbonate ramp built out to the south on the passive margin of the Arctic Alaskan Plate. The Arctic Alaskan Plate was then rifted and rotated in

280-567: The Early to Mid Cretaceous . This rifting created the Barrow Arch that separates the ANS from the Canadian Basin . As the plate continued to rotate it collided with the island arch chain, initiating the Brooks Range Orogeny . As the Brooks Range uplifted subsidence dropped the carbonate ramp and created a massive amount of accommodation space in the foothills region. Sedimentation couldn't keep up with

308-735: The National Petroleum Reserve–Alaska (NPRA), which was established by President Warren G. Harding in 1923 as an oil supply for the US Navy, though the presence of oil in the region had been known by American whalers for some time. It contains the bulk of Alaska's known petroleum until the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field was discovered (outside the NPRA) in 1968, followed by the Kuparuk River oil field in 1969. The petroleum extracted from

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336-502: The U.S. Geological Survey estimated 3.6 billion barrels of oil and 8.9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in Mississippian through Paleogene strata in the central North Slope of Alaska, which are undiscovered and technically recoverable. 69°03′28″N 152°51′46″W  /  69.0578758°N 152.8628274°W  / 69.0578758; -152.8628274 Alaska North Slope basin The Alaskan North Slope (ANS)

364-524: The subsidence forming a shallow anoxic sea during the Late Cretaceous to Tertiary . These sediments, along with the Mississippian to Jurassic carbonate and shallow marine deposits, form the source and reservoir rock throughout the ANS foreland basin . The stratigraphy of the ANS is broken up into three major sequences the Ellesmerian, Beaufortian, and Brookian. The Ellesmerian Sequence

392-510: The ANS. The Barrow Arch runs east to west along the length of the basin and separates the ANS foreland basin from the Canadian Basin to the north. Sediments have a subtle dip of 3°-6° southward into the Colville trough. The Colville Trough is the deepest part of the ANS Basin. It is on the southern edge of the foothills province just below the Brooks Range . The Colville Trough was formed in

420-740: The Alaskan veterans of World War II . Both monuments overlooked the lagoon crash site. Photos from the summer of 2017 show only the original monument still standing. The Stubbs monument was relocated to Barrow in 2016 after its location was threatened by coastal erosion . Another memorial had been previously dedicated in Barrow on August 15, 1982. The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. Alaska North Slope The entire Arctic coastal plain of Alaska with its Arctic coastal tundra has tremendous ecological importance with

448-523: The Arctic in oil production with about 15 billion barrels produced, 12 billion barrels coming from the Prudhoe Bay field. Most of the production comes from the coastal area along the Barrow Arch where hydrocarbons are structurally and stratigraphically trapped migrating up the LCU. New fields are being found further from the structure associated with the Barrow Arch and they are more stratigraphically trapped by Cretaceous to Cenozoic deposits. As of 2006,

476-629: The Beaufortian sequence are the Kingak Shale and the Pebble Shale. The Pebble Shale Unit caps the LCU and is also a great hydrocarbon source unit. The Brookian Sequence was deposited from the Cretaceous to the Tertiary . This sequence is dominated by siliciclastic deposits sourced by both shallow marine and terrestrial deposits. This sequence is the thickest deposit of sediment and it coincides with

504-530: The Prudhoe Bay Oil Field and neighboring reserves is also a potential source for unconventional tight oil and shale gas – possibly containing "up to 2 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil and up to 80 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, according to a 2012 U.S. Geological Survey report." Alaska North Slope (ANS) is a more expensive waterborne crude oil. Since 1987, Alaska North Slope (ANS) crude production has been in decline. As of 2020,

532-450: The basin the Colville trough, with a maximum depth around 30,000 ft. The northern foothills province is made up of numerous elongated detachment folds in Mid to Late Cretaceous deposits. The coastal plain is a flat, low relief, area that is covered by Pleistocene deposits lacking structure until the Barrow Arch. The Barrow Arch is a hinge line fault zone that marks a northern high in

560-730: The bottom of the Landsat 7 image on the right, the rugged terrain of the Brooks Range mountains is snow-covered in places (blue areas) and exposed (pink areas) in others. Much of the region is located politically in North Slope Borough , and geographically in the Alaska North Slope basin . On August 12, 2018, a 6.4 magnitude earthquake hit the region, the most powerful recorded for the Alaskan North Slope. The region includes

588-570: The city of Utqiaġvik to a point just west of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Ira Harkey quotes Noel Wien as stating that in the 1920s, "To keep warm and to cook with, the Eskimo was burning hunks of dark stuff he just picked up on the ground all around his tent. This was oil from seepage under the tundra. The Eskimos had always known about the oil, long before there was any drilling for it." The North Slope region includes

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616-546: The densest concentration of birds in the Arctic, along with housing substantial amounts of large mammals such as whales, walrus, seals, caribou, and moose. The region includes the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) as well as the National Petroleum Reserve–Alaska (NPRA). Within the North Slope, only a surface "active layer" of the tundra thaws each season; most of the soil is permanently frozen year-round. On top of this permafrost , water flows out to sea via shallow, braided streams or settles into pools and ponds. Along

644-564: The formation of the Brooks Range . Multiple reservoir units as well as hydrocarbon sources are present throughout. The Brookian sequence hosts multiple important formations for hydrocarbon exploration like the Hue Shale, Torok , Nanushuk , Seabee, and Schrader Bluff . The Torok Formation was deposited on the floor of the deep basin. The Alaskan North Slope is one of the most prolific oil producing basins in North America. It dominates

672-705: The larger, with a pink granite memorial marker quarried near the Rogers family home in Claremore, Oklahoma . The elaborate dedication ceremonies involved a four-way CBS radio broadcast from Barrow, the United States Capitol , the Oklahoma State Capitol , and the Texas State Capitol . The second monument, built 15 years later, is a concrete obelisk consisting of four diminishing rectangular blocks, and

700-464: The motor failed. The aircraft plummeted into the lagoon and overturned. It was the first fatal air accident near the city of Utqiaġvik. The first monument at the site was dedicated three years after the crash and financed through nationwide public subscription. It was designed in Oklahoma , home of both Rogers and Post, and built from poured concrete . The design was essentially two cubes, the smaller atop

728-735: The region is transferred south by means of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System to Valdez on the Pacific Ocean . In 2005 the USGS estimated that the Arctic Alaska Petroleum Province, encompassing all the lands and adjacent Continental Shelf areas north of the Brooks Range-Herald arch (see map) held more than 50 billion bbl of oil and natural-gas liquids and 227 trillion cubic feet of gas. The source rock for

756-414: The top three oil-producing fields in the Alaskan North Slope were: As of 2006, the majority of the oil produced came from reserves in the Ellesmerian sequence. The central part of the location dominated production, specifically the Prudhoe Bay field , where there has been much structural trapping associated to the rifting and formation of the Barrow Arch. Oil pools continue to be discovered further from

784-556: Was deposited from the Mississippian to Triassic . Carbonate and shallow marine deposits accumulated on a southern facing passive margin . The Ellesmerian sequence thickens towards the south into the Colville Trough and west into the Hannah Trough, located in the Chukchi Sea . The Ellesmerian sequence hosts important reservoir and source rock units that are exploited throughout the region for hydrocarbons . The Lisburne Group

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