Locations of Uraniferous Boulder Fields and Swamps along the North Shore of Lake Athabasca, NTS 74M (GIS data, polygon features)

Locations of uraniferous boulders fields and uraniferous swamps extracted from industry assessment reports are useful metallogenetic indicators for uranium exploration within and around the Athabasca Basin. They are used as pathfinders to uranium occurrences and prospects. These locations along the northern rim of the Athabasca Basin in Alberta have been compiled in GIS format and delivered as a polygon shapefile.

In Alberta, the northern rim of the Athabasca Basin and the regolith underlying the Athabasca unconformity are locally exposed along the northern shore of Lake Athabasca. Extensive uranium exploration work in the 1970s, including scintillometer prospecting traverses, geological mapping, airborne and ground geophysics, and drilling, have documented several uraniferous outcrops with scintillometer readings of up to 10 000 counts per second, and uraniferous boulders and boulder trains with radioactivity up to two orders of magnitude higher than the background. Near the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, uraniferous boulders show geochemical characteristics consistent with a Saskatchewan source, whereas to the west boulders have a distinct geochemical signal suggesting a local source in Alberta.