- The Fayetteville Shale entry redirects here.
The Fayetteville Formation, often referred to as the Fayetteville Shale, is made of three layers: a lower black shale, the Wedington Sandstone, and an upper black shale.
The Fayetteville Formation rests on the Batesville Formation except in places where the Batesville has eroded and then directly on the Boone Formation.
It is overlain by the Pitkin Formation of the Mississippian System or by the Hale Formation of the Pennsylvanian System.
Frederick Willard Simonds, a professor of biology and geology at the Arkansas Industrial University, named the unit in 1891 while completing a geological survey of Washington County.
The formation crops out in an area extending 225 miles east to west, from about Batesville, Arkansas, on the east to the Neosho River in Oklahoma on the west. The outcroppings are about 80 miles north to south. More than 45% of the surface of the Fayetteville quadrangle is the lower shale.