Geophysical Applications within the Bureau of Land Management

Abstract

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), an agency within the U.S. Department of the Interior, administers 261 million acres of America?s public lands that are located primarily in the 12 Western States. The BLM?s mission is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of these lands for a broad spectrum of uses. Balancing these multiple uses requires a management approach that utilizes innovative scientific tools, and applications of geophysical methods are often used to resolve a variety of geological, environmental, hydrogeologic and archeological problems. The BLM has experienced a particular increase in the demands for geophysical applications for the characterization and remediation of hazardous waste sites and abandoned mine lands. To effectively achieve many project objectives the BLM?s National Science and Technology Center (NSTC) has invested in the ability to provide, as much as possible, field processing and interpretation capabilities for immediate information exchange with the local management and their resource specialist. Several case studies are presented as examples of BLM?s geophysical applications.