confirmed the occurrence of extensive gas hydrates commingled with the permafrost (the Tarn trend) in an area just west to the Eileen accumulations. These natural gas hydrate trends coincide with portions of established oil reservoirs within the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field (Prudhoe Bay Unit - PBU), Kuparuk River Unit (KRU), and Milne Point Unit (MPU) and are situated within and beneath a thick layer of permafrost at a depth of up to 600 meters below the surface. This area is located along the northernmost boundary of the Colville Basin, which initially formed during a Jurassic-Cretaceous rifting event that resulted in the separation of the North American margin to the south and the Arctic Composite Terrane to the north. Due to a slow but constant subsidence rate and a relatively steady flux of clastic sediments into the Colville Basin, the basin has grown and evolved during the last 120 million years and is now bounded by the Brooks Range mountain front to the south and east and by the Barrow Arch to the north, which roughly follows the Alaskan-Beaufort coastline. In the Arctic, gas hydrates may occur naturally onshore in association with permafrost regions, and at or below the seafloor in marine sediments. In the case of permafrost-associated settings in northern Alaska and Canada, gas hydrate occurrences have been identified in sand-rich units deposited in near-shore and onshore environments. Unlike the majority of gas hydrate occurrences around the world it is believed that many of the sand-rich Arctic deposits on the North Slope were originally conventional free-gas accumulations. During the last glacial period these formerly free-gas reservoirs likely became trapped as hydrates as atmospheric and subsurface temperatures dropped. The geometry, host-reservoir, and physical and chemical properties of the modern natural gas hydrate occurrences point to a conversion of conventional free-gas accumulations when they were cooled down to a point that was well within the hydrate stability conditions, and hydrates could form (see UNEP Global Outlook on Methane Gas Hydrates (2012, in progress) for more details and also Collett et al., 2011 for a full synopsis on Alaska North Slope gas hydrates). The Mount Elbert Gas Hydrate Scientific Research Well, ANS The Mt. Elbert Gas Hydrate Stratigraphic Test Well, part of the “Methane Hydrate Research and Development (R&D) Program,” was located on the Alaska North Slope within the Milne Point Unit of the greater Prudhoe Bay Oil Field. The well was drilled