After the Bakken and the Eagle Ford came the Permian—the biggest of all. The Permian Basin sprawls across seventy-five thousand square miles in West Texas down into southeastern New Mexico. Much of it is characterized as a “featureless high plain.” It draws its name from rocks that are characteristic of the Permian geologic age, which ended with the “great extinction” that wiped out most living creatures about 250 million years ago. The name itself was derived from the Russian city of Perm, where in the nineteenth century a British geologist had identified rocks of that geologic era.
