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Distribution of large boulders on the deposit of the West Salt Creek rock avalanche, western Colorado

Metadata Updated: July 6, 2024

On May 25th, 2014, a 54.5 Mm3 rock avalanche occurred in the West Salt Creek valley in western Colorado following heavy rainfall on top of snow (Coe and others, 2016a). The data in this project includes boulder density in 20-m x 20-m grid cells for the entire West Salt Creek rock avalanche deposit. The grid cells cover 2,154,800 m2, which accounts for nearly the entire surface of the deposit. We estimated boulder density by counting 1-m or larger diameter boulders of sedimentary rock that are visible in high-resolution Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) imagery collected for the area in July of 2014 (Coe and others, 2016b). Basalt boulders were excluded from the count because field observations indicated that they generally stayed intact as the avalanche moved downslope, whereas the sedimentary boulders showed evidence of fragmentation during downslope movement. Variable clarity, contrast and resolution of the imagery precluded mapping smaller boulders. Experimentation with 5-m, 10-m and 20-m resolution grids showed that 20-m resolution was fine enough to show the spatial pattern of boulder density across the deposit and coarse enough to show statistically meaningful variation in boulder density. The attribute table contains fields containing (1) the boulder count in each grid cell, as well as (2) six categories of successively increasing boulder density. Lewis and others (2022) describe the mapping procedures in greater detail. References cited Lewis, A.C., Baum, R.L., and Coe, J.A., in review, Distribution of large boulders on the deposit of the West Salt Creek rock avalanche, western Colorado: U.S. Geological Survey Data Report 22-XXXX. Coe, J.A., Baum, R.L., Allstadt, K.E., Kochevar, B.F., Jr., Schmitt, R.G., Morgan, M.L., White, J.L., Stratton, B.T., Hayashi, T.A., and Kean, J.W., 2016a, Rock-avalanche dynamics revealed by large-scale field mapping and seismic signals at a highly mobile avalanche in the West Salt Creek valley, western Colorado: Geosphere, v. 12, no. 2, p. 607–631, https://doi.org/10.1130/GES01265.1. Coe, J.A., Baum, R.L., Allstadt, K.E., Kochevar, B.F., Schmitt, R.G., Morgan, M.L., White, J.L., Stratton, B.T., Hayashi, T.A., and Kean, J.W., 2016b, Map data and unmanned aircraft system imagery from the May 25, 2014 West Salt Creek rock avalanche in western Colorado: U.S. Geological Survey data release, http://dx.doi.org/10.5066/F74J0C55.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

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Dates

Metadata Created Date June 1, 2023
Metadata Updated Date July 6, 2024

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOI EDI

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date June 1, 2023
Metadata Updated Date July 6, 2024
Publisher U.S. Geological Survey
Maintainer
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Identifier USGS:611fd481d34e40dd9c01da22
Data Last Modified 20230717
Category geospatial
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 010:12
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://datainventory.doi.gov/data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id b45dcfae-1801-4407-9fc9-0fdbf252ba8c
Harvest Source Id 52bfcc16-6e15-478f-809a-b1bc76f1aeda
Harvest Source Title DOI EDI
Metadata Type geospatial
Old Spatial -107.8628,39.1662,-107.8437,39.2036
Publisher Hierarchy White House > U.S. Department of the Interior > U.S. Geological Survey
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash df8913d3f48c9dfa33b3185a85e40071d59c43ee8ce4ef957ec24244fc006c47
Source Schema Version 1.1
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