Geology and Resource Assessment of Costa Rica at 1:500,000 Scale

The results were published as a large 80- by 50-cm color folio (U.S. Geological Survey and others, 1987). The 75-page document consists of maps as well as descriptive and interpretive text in English and Spanish covering physiographic, geologic, geochemical, geophysical, and mineral site themes as well as a mineral-resource assessment. The following maps are present in the original folio: 1) Physiographic base map at a scale of 1:500,000 with hypsography, place names, and drainage. 2) Geologic map at a scale of 1:500,000. 3) Regional geophysical maps, including gravity, aeromagnetic, and seismicity maps at various scales. 4) Mineral sites map at a scale of 1:500,000 showing mines, prospects, and occurrences. 5) Volcanological framework of the Tilar&aacuten region important for epithermal gold deposits at a scale of 1:100,000. 6) Rock sample locations, mining areas, and vein locations for several parts of the country. 7) Permissive areas delineated for selected mineral deposit types. 8) Digital elevation model.

This CD-ROM contains most of the above maps; it lacks items 1 and 8 and the seismicity and aeromagnetic maps of item 3. The linework was digitized from preliminary and printed maps with GSMAP (Selner and Taylor, 1987), a USGS-authored program for map editing and publishing. Conversion from GSMAP to ARC/INFO was accomplished through the use of the GSMARC program (Green and Selner, 1988).

The arcs and polygons were tagged using Alacarte (Wentworth and Fitzgibbon, 1991). [Summary provided by the USGS.]