Welcome to a new series in the AAPG Learn! Blog entitled “My Favorite Outcrop.” In this series, we chat with geoscientists who tell us about their favorite outcrops encountered during their work in the field.

Today we meet with Clara Abu, who is one of the founding members of the Salt Basins Technical Interest Group. One of her favorite outcrops was in Tusher Canyon, Utah, featured in the photo.

Where have you spent time in the field? Which place was most interesting to you?

I have attended fieldtrips in Colorado (Grand Junction), Utah (Book Cliffs, Coal Cliffs, Arches National Park, Paradox Basin, Onion Creek), New Mexico (Guadalupe Canyon, Buena Vista, Colleen Canyon, Brushy Canyon Formation), California (Torrey Pines State Reserve: Delmar Formation and Torrey sandstone; San Clemente State Beach; Capistrano Formation)), in the USA, the Wessex Basin, Dorset and Somerset in the UK; the Arabian Gulf in the United Arab Emirates.

I enjoyed all and most especially the Paradox Basin due to spectacular overviews of key stratigraphic units as well as an understanding of various scales and heterogeneities of salt related structures in the northern Paradox Basin that are not clearly seen on seismic. I also thoroughly enjoyed integrating core, logs, and outcrop in building realistic models of the subsurface at the Book cliffs, Utah.