About YGS | Contact Staff | YGS News | Site Map | Links
5. Digital Surficial Geology Map
Surficial geology maps have become one of the most fundamental requirements employed in land-use planning. They are used to facilitate mineral and placer exploration, forest management, biophysical mapping, transportation and pipeline infrastructure planning, granular resource assessments, terrain stability mapping and landslide inventories, permafrost modeling and thaw sensitivity mapping, agriculture assessments and hydrogeology/groundwater hydrology studies.
Over the last 30 years, various scales of surficial geology mapping have been completed in Yukon. This has largely been carried out by the Geological Survey of Canada with additional local-scale mapping completed by DIAND, the Yukon Geological Survey and private stakeholders. At present, about 75% of the Yukon has had the surficial geology mapped at a minimum of 1:250 000 scale. Only about 1/5th of this mapping is currently in some kind of digital format.
The YGS has recently begun to compile all of Yukon's surficial geology maps into digital format. The project will involve digitizing all previously non-digital maps and compiling all digital data into a common format with a standard Territory-wide surficial geological legend. The entire project is expected to be completed by the end of 2007.
For more information on this project, please contact Panya Lipovsky email or Jeffrey Bond email