Alberta Geological Survey partnered with Alberta Environment (AENV) Northern Region to compile and analyze groundwater data in the Cold Lake-Beaver River Drainage Basin.
The compilation and analysis assisted AENV and its stakeholders to update the Beaver River-Cold Lake Water Management Plan. The project completed a digital, three-dimensional geological model of the area. This digital release contains the outlines of formation boundaries used in that report, specifically the boundaries for preglacial and glacial formations.
Visual inspection confirms all polygon boundaries matched up correctly when overlaying the appended shapefile with the originals. There are no missing or incorrect polygon attributes.
For a description of how the formations were defined and mapped, refer to Section 3.3 of Alberta Geological Survey Special Report 074.
Alberta Geological Survey (AGS) geologists L.D. Andriashek and M.M. Fenton mapped and named the glacial and preglacial formations in the Sand River NTS 73L map area based on the dominant lithological character of the sediments. The approach was lithostratigraphic. Alberta Geological Survey Bulletin 57 contains this work.
Subsequent preglacial and glacial sediment mapping in the Cold Lake-Beaver River area mapped these formations into areas beyond the extent of the Sand River NTS 73L maps area. Mapping completed for AGS Special Report 074 provided confirmation and some modification of the original polygon extents of these formation boundaries. The original mapping coupled with subsequent mapping formed the basis for the polygon extents presented in this digital release.
We created the shapefile by combining 12 different polygon shapefiles - one for each formation exported from the original software packages used to generate the polygons.
For each shapefile
1. all columns in the attribute table from the original shapefile were deleted except for COMP, which describes the major type of materials for the formation; and
2. a new column called UNIT was created to store the formation name.
We used the Append tool to append all shapefiles into a final shapefile.