Digital location of monoclines and structural uplifts of the Colorado Plateau, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah

The Colorado Plateau structural province features long monoclinal flexures between uplifts and basins that are the major lines of deformation within and marginal to the Plateau. These folds are named, well-known, and have been described as part of several previous tectonic syntheses of the Colorado Plateau (Kelley, 1955; Davis, 1978; 1999). However, no digital data have ever been created that locate these folds in digital map space. This digital dataset compiles mapped locations of monoclinal folds from several geologic maps from the Colorado Plateau, most released only in “paper”, non-vector format. Fold names and their general map trace were guided by regional-scale maps that synthesize the tectonic elements of the Colorado Plateau, but specific location of the fold axes relied on detailed geologic maps, augmented by inspection of imagery and digital elevation models. Structural Uplifts on the Colorado Plateau are doubly plunging, asymmetric, elliptical shaped anticlinal features often bounded on one side by a monoclinal fold. Locations and shapes of the major structural uplifts on the Colorado Plateau were modified from regional tectonic maps (Kelley, 1955; Davis, 1978; 1999) and are included with the digital dataset primarily for reference and context. The dataset includes a geographic information system geodatabase that contains a polyline feature class of the monocline fold axes and a polygon feature class showing the general location of structural uplifts. Vector data are attributed according to the USGS National Cooperative Geologic Mapping Program’s GeMS digital geologic map schema; monoclines are attributed within a GeologicLines feature class and uplifts are attributed within an OverlayPolys feature class. The spatial data are accompanied by non-spatial tables that describe the sources of geologic information, a glossary of terms, and a Data Dictionary that duplicates the Entity and Attribute information contained in the metadata file. To maximize usability, spatial data are also distributed as shapefiles and tabular data are distributed as ascii text files in comma separated values (CSV) format.