Word: sagebrush
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Finally, at an altitude of 8,200 ft., the track breaks through onto a rolling plateau of sagebrush, juniper and pine. It is here, on this remote plateau, southwest of Rifle, Colo., that Caterpillars of the Colony Development Operation have already cut 300 yds. into a mountain of shale. Near by, in another canyon, Union Oil engineers monitor a conveyor belt delivering a stream of shale into a giant funnel. Some 40 miles south, at Logan's Wash, Occidental Petroleum miners have cut two mine faces into the sides of a shale mountain. Farther northwest lies another tract...
While his discovery is a valuable shortcut to mapping such rock formations, Raines says that deposits would not be found under every sagebrush patch...
Prospecting with sagebrush...
Since 1972, geologists have studied Landsat satellite images of the earth's landscape to choose areas to explore for oil, gas, copper and other minerals. Now a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey has studied such pictures and found that concentrations of sagebrush may indicate deposits of uranium...
...Gary Raines reached that conclusion in 1977 when he studied images of a 13,000-sq.-km (5,000-sq.-mi.) section of the Powder River Basin in northeastern Wyoming and southeastern Montana, taken from 920 km (570 miles) above the earth. He noted that clusters of medium density sagebrush on the photographic maps fell in the same area as known uranium deposits. Further study showed that this type of vegetation pattern coincided with the kind of sandy shale rock formations that often accompany uranium deposits...