by Bruce Wells | Jul 29, 2025 | Petroleum Art
Cartoonist Victor Hamlin worked as an oilfield cartographer in the Permian Basin.
The widely popular Depression Era newspaper comic strip character Alley Oop began in the imagination of a young cartographer who drew Permian Basin oilfield maps in Texas.
The club-wielding Alley Oop caveman appeared for the first time in the summer of 1933 when Victor Hamlin, a former Ft. Worth Star-Telegram reporter, published fanciful tales about the Stone Age Kingdom of Moo. Hamlin began syndicating his daily cartoon in Iowa’s Des Moines Register.
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by Bruce Wells | Sep 9, 2024 | This Week in Petroleum History
September 10, 1969 – Second Nuclear Fracturing Test –
A 40-kiloton nuclear device was detonated about eight miles southeast of present-day Parachute, in Garfield County, Colorado. Project Rulison was the second of three natural-gas-reservoir stimulation tests that were part of Operation Plowshare, a government program to study uses of nuclear explosives for peaceful purposes.
The first nuclear fracturing test, Project Gasbuggy, detonated a 29-kiloton device in a New Mexico well in December 1967. The third unconventional test to increase production was Project Rio Blanco, a 1973 detonation in a Rio Blanco County, Colorado, natural gas well. (more…)
