Map Releases

Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado was established in 1906 to preserve and protect the artifacts and dwelling sites, including the famous cliff dwellings, of the Ancestral Puebloan people who lived in the area from about A.D. 550 to A.D. 1300. In 1978, the United Nations designated the park as a World Heritage Site. The geology of the park played a key role in the lives of...

The 1:100,000-scale Cuddeback Lake quadrangle is located in the western Mojave Desert north-northeast of Los Angeles, between the southern Sierra Nevada and San Bernardino Mountains, in Kern and San Bernardino Counties, California. Geomorphic features include high-relief mountains, small hills, volcanic domes, pediments, broad alluvial valleys, and dry lakes. It is one in a series of...

This map was prepared as part of a suite of surficial geologic maps covering the northern Mojave Desert to investigate neotectonic features and map soils of relevance for ecological properties. The map covers an area of the eastern Mojave Desert that includes the Cinder Cones, Cima Dome, Ivanpah Valley, and Lanfair Valley and includes major mountain chains of the Providence, New York...

Much of the oil and gas in the Illinois, Michigan, and Appalachian basins of eastern North America is thought to be derived from Devonian shale that is within these basins (for example, Milici and others, 2003; Swezey, 2002, 2008, 2009; Swezey and others, 2005, 2007). As the Devonian strata were buried by younger sediments, the Devonian shale was subjected to great temperature and...

The Floridan aquifer system (FAS) covers an area of approximately 100,000 square miles in Florida and parts of Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi. Groundwater wells for water supply were first drilled in the late 1800s and by the year 2000, the FAS was the primary source of drinking water for about 10 million people. One of the methods for assessing groundwater...

Crater Lake partially fills the caldera that formed approximately 7,700 years ago during the eruption of a 12,000-ft-high volcano known as Mount Mazama. The caldera-forming, or climactic, eruption of Mount Mazama devastated the surrounding landscape, left a thick deposit of pumice and ash in adjacent valleys, and spread a blanket of volcanic ash as far away as southern Canada. Prior to...

Most of the subsidence in the Houston–Galveston region, Texas, has occurred as a direct result of groundwater withdrawals for municipal supply, commercial and industrial use, and irrigation that depressured and dewatered the Chicot and Evangeline aquifers and caused compaction of the clay layers of the aquifer sediments. This report—prepared by the U.S. Geological Survey in cooperation...

The Tualatin Mountains form a northwest-striking ridge about 350 m high that separates Portland, Oregon, from the cities of the Tualatin Valley to the west. Known informally as the Portland Hills, the ridge is a late Cenozoic anticline, bounded by reverse faults that dip toward the anticlinal axis. The anticline is a broad, open fold consisting chiefly of Miocene Columbia River Basalt...

The Coastal belt of the Franciscan Complex represents a Late Cretaceous to Miocene accretionary prism and overlying slope deposits. Its equivalents may extend from the offshore outer borderland of southern California to north of the Mendocino Triple Junction under the Eel River Basin and in the offshore of Cascadia. The Coastal belt is exposed on land in northern California, yet its...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) created bathymetric and sediment facies maps for portions of two reaches of Lake Roosevelt in support of an interdisciplinary study of white sturgeon (Acipenser transmontanus) and their habitat areas within Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake, Washington. In October 2008, scientists from the USGS used a boat-mounted multibeam echo sounder (MBES) to describe...

The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the City of Tuscaloosa, conducted a bathymetric survey of Carroll Creek, on May 12-13, 2010. Carroll Creek is one of the major tributaries to Lake Tuscaloosa and contributes about 6 percent of the surface drainage area. A 3.5-mile reach of Carroll Creek was surveyed to prepare a current bathymetric map, determine storage capacities at...

The bedrock geology of the 7.5-minute Grafton, Massachusetts, quadrangle consists of deformed Neoproterozoic to early Paleozoic crystalline metamorphic and intrusive igneous rocks. Neoproterozoic intrusive, metasedimentary, and metavolcanic rocks crop out in the Avalon zone, and Cambrian to Silurian intrusive, metasedimentary, and metavolcanic rocks crop out in the Nashoba zone. Rocks of...