THE USGS WILDERNESS PROGRAM

Mike Diggles

The Wilderness Program started after the 1964 Wilderness Act (Public Law 88-577, September 3, 1964) and covered mostly U.S. Forest Service land. The USGS continued its wilderness studies on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Wilderness Study Areas under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA; Public Law 94-579, October 21, 1976), which required the U.S. Geological Survey and the (former) U.S. Bureau of Mines to conduct mineral surveys on certain areas to determine the mineral values, if any, that may be present. Results were made available to the public and submitted to the President and the Congress.

Mineral resource potential is defined as the likelihood of the presence of the mineral resources in a defined area; it is not a measure of the amount of resources or their profitability. Mineral resources are concentrations of naturally occurring solid, liquid, or gaseous materials in such form and amount that economic extraction of a commodity from the concentration is currently or potentially feasible. Geologists from the Menlo Park campus spent from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s mapping, sampling, and assessing remote areas. A total of 23.2 million acres in half a dozen western states were studied. As an example, the Nevada studies on BLM land alone covered 5.1 million acres. In addition to identifying permissive tracts and assessing the likelihood that undiscovered mineral deposits are present, a wealth of basic bedrock geologic mapping was done under this funding.

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