Black Warrior Basin

The Black Warrior Basin is a natural area in western Alabama and northern Mississippi in the United States. It gets its name from the Black Warrior River. People use this area to find important resources like coal, coalbed methane, oil, and natural gas. The coalbed methane here has been used for longer than anywhere else in the United States, coming from a layer called the Pennsylvanian Pottsville Coal Interval.

Long ago, during the Pennsylvanian and Permian Periods, the Black Warrior Basin was a place where layers of earth built up because of big mountain movements called the Ouachita Orogeny. It also received materials from another mountain-building event, the Appalachian orogeny, during the Pennsylvanian time. The western edge of this basin is under the sediments of the Mississippi embayment, connecting to the Arkoma Basin in northern Arkansas and northeastern Oklahoma. For a very long time, from the Cambrian through the Mississippian Periods, this area was a calm, shallow part of the ocean where sand, mud, limestone, dolomite, and chert settled down.