Geological Survey established in 1879

The job of the 900 men and women at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Pacific Coast Center in Menlo Park was set forth by the Congress of the United States in 1879, 74 years before the Geological Survey moved to Menlo Park.

Its act creating the Geological Survey, the Organic Act, charged the Survey with the responsibility for mapping the entire United States and its possessions and with determining the nation’s mineral and water resources.

It is a job that staggers the imagination; a job that will never be done.

But it is a job that brings the Geological Survey’s skilled specialists as close as man can get to learning the story of the land on which he lives.

The cornerstone of the Geological Survey’s job is mapping. First come the topographic maps of the nation’s physical features; then the geological maps that chart the potential resources lying beneath the earth’s surface.

Palo Alto Times
February 19, 1964

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