U.S. Geological Survey
Box 25046, MS 902
Denver Federal Center
Denver, CO 80225-0046
Telephone: (303) 236-5476
Fax: (303) 236-6287
e-mail: delane@usgs.gov
Because the publications group and some of the authors anticipate that these maps will have an audience beyond the technical sphere, they designed the map sheets to include many photographs and artistic drawings that supplement the scientific data. For example, the map sheet for the Grand Canyon includes several drawings from 19th-century USGS reports, giving an historical perspective to our science. The map sheet for the Colorado National Monument includes visually prominent sections on history and ecology, in addition to geology, that are illustrated with drawings and photographs of wildlife and petroglyphs, as well as of landforms. Both map sheets also include all the conventional components of a geologic map report: the map itself, a correlation diagram, cross sections, and a complete technical description of the map units.
The core information on the two geologic maps is technical, the same information that would be supplied to a scientific audience. The publications differ from conventional geologic maps in that additional graphics were included to increase their popular appeal. These maps will be eye-catching additions to the publications sold by the visitor centers at the Grand Canyon and the Colorado National Monument. However, the map showing earthquake data from a period of more than 300 years for the northeastern United States was specifically designed to appeal to a nontechnical audience. The supplemental illustrations are photographs of earthquake damage from the late 20th century and, most dramatically, images of newspaper headlines from the mid-20th century and woodcuts from the mid-18th century that recorded the earthquakes of those eras. A quotation from a 1755 broadside, set as a graphic in large type, appeals to the imagination in a way that the basic data of scientific discourse may not: "See! how poor Wretches from their Beds Affrightedly arise, And to their clatt' ring Windows run, With Horror in their Eyes!"
The earthquake map is supplemented by a fact sheet (Wheeler and others, 2001b), and a press conference was held upon the release of both of these publications (see the press release at http://www.usgs.gov/public/press/public_affairs/press_releases/pr1445m.html). Analysis of server activity for the week following the press conference showed 2,497 downloads of the PDF (Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format) file for the fact sheet and 35,463 downloads of the PDF file for the map sheet (Eugene Ellis, written commun., 2001).
For the earthquake map, the authors plotted the locations of earthquakes and imported them into ArcInfo. They created the shaded-relief base map in ArcInfo from USGS DEM ' s (Digital Elevation Models) and exported it as an EPS file. All our attempts to open this EPS file in Illustrator were fruitless, the process taking 8 hours or more without success. (In our experience, importing large graphics files from ArcInfo and ArcView is often not feasible, possibly because of the way graphics are drawn in those programs.) Therefore we rasterized the shaded-relief base at high resolution (325 dpi) in Photoshop and then imported it into the Illustrator 8.0 layout, an approach that we had previously found to be successful. A graphic artist imported word-processing files into the Illustrator layout and formatted the text there. The artist then added scanned photographs, woodcuts, newspaper headlines, and other design elements, also working with the images in Photoshop and Illustrator, and completed the final design and layout in Illustrator.
Lane, D.E., Donatich, Alex, Brunstein, F.C., and Shock, N.A., 1999, Digital geologic map production and database development in the Central Publications Group of the Geologic Division, U.S. Geological Survey, in Soller, D.R., ed., Digital mapping techniques '99 -- Workshop proceedings: U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 99-386, p. 11-15, https://pubs.usgs.gov/openfile/of99-386/lane.html.
Scott, R.B., Harding, A.E., Hood, W.C., Cole, R.D., Livaccari, R.F., Johnson, J.B., Shroba, R.R., and Dickerson, R.P., 2001, Geologic map of Colorado National Monument and adjacent areas, Mesa County, Colorado: U.S. Geological Survey, Geologic Investigations Series I-2740, scale 1:24,000; includes pamphlet, 40 p., http://geology.cr.usgs.gov/pub/i-maps/i-2740/.
Wheeler, R.L., Trevor, N.K., Tarr, A.C., and Crone, A.J., 2001a, Earthquakes in and near the northeastern United States, 1638-1998: U.S. Geological Survey Geologic Investigations Series I-2737, scale 1:1, 500,000, http://geology.cr.usgs.gov/pub/i-maps/i-2737/.
Wheeler, R.L., Trevor, N.K., Tarr, A.C., and Crone, A.J., 2001b, Earthquakes in and near the northeastern United States, 1638-1998: U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 0006-01, http://geology.cr.usgs.gov/pub/fact-sheets/fs-0006-01/.