Glg101

1. Oil production in the United States satisfies only half of the country's needs; the rest is imported. If imports were cut off, what changes would you expect to occur in your lifestyle?

If we had imports cut off then the changes I would expect to occur in my lifestyle would be lower gas prices and increased renewable non-petroleum fuels. An increase in transportation would allow us a more livable environment that would have us driving less or possibly using natural gas and hybrid cars.

2. Investigate how geophysicist M. King Hubbert predicted in 1956 that annual U.S. oil production would peak in the early 1970s (the actual peak occurred in 1971). Also, investigate the debate over whether the same predictive technique can be applied to world oil supplies. When do you think world oil production will reach its peak—or has it done so already?

The most likely scenario would be for crude oil production to stay plateaued at around 68-69 million barrels a day. If this happened, the crude oil production would “never regain its all-time peak of 70 million barrels a day that was reached in 2006” IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2010 said. I feel that the peak has already been reached for our world’s oil production because the prices rising, declined investments by the oil industry, and cutback of the greenhouse gas emissions.

3. Many hydrothermal mineral deposits of copper, gold, silver, and other metals have been found in the countries bordering the Pacific Ocean. Can you offer an explanation for this remarkable concentration? If you were part of a team of exploration geologists looking for large copper deposits, where would you focus your search?

Porphyry copper deposits and iron oxide copper gold deposits are two types that rely in part on supergene enrichment, otherwise known as hydrothermal alteration. They can both make large disseminated copper deposits. A lot of the large deposits are formed in South America because seduction...