Airborne magnetic and radiometric survey, west central Utah, 2023-2024

This data release provides digital flight-line and gridded data for a high-resolution airborne magnetic and radiometric survey over a part of west central Utah. The survey was acquired as part of the UGSS Earth Mapping Resource Initiative (Earth MRI) to improve our understanding of the fundamental geologic framework of the region with applications to evaluating natural resources and geologic hazards. The survey traverses a region of west central Utah that includes Toole, Utah, Juab, Millard, Beaver, Sevier, Piute, and Iron counties. The survey area hosts multiple known and potential mineralizing systems including Basin brine path, Carlin-type, Climax-type, Lacustrine evaporite, Marine chemocline, Meteoric convection, and Porphyry Cu-Mo-Au. The potential critical mineral commodities include antimony, arsenic, beryllium, bismuth, fluorspar, indium, lithium, magnesium, manganese, PGE, potash, rhenium, scandium, tellurium, tungsten, uranium, vanadium, and zinc. Data for this survey were acquired and processed by New Sense Geophysics Ltd (NSGL) under contract to Merrick-Surdex Joint Venture and the USGS. The survey was flown from August 2023 to October 2024 with a combination of fixed wing airplanes and helicopters, with helicopter coverage over areas with more mountainous topography. Pre-planned flight lines were flown in an E-W direction with 200-m line spacing; N-S tie-lines were flown with 2000-m line spacing. The nominal flight height of 100 meters (m) above ground, with areas having higher population densities flown at a nominal height of 330 m above ground for safety reasons. A total of approximately 144,600 linear kilometers of data were collected covering a bounding box area of 200-km E-W by 275 km N-S. Following acquisition, NSGL also performed extensive post-processing of the data and delivered the final databases, grids, and images. Details regarding the flights and data processing are described in the contractor report provided in this release