The
Arizona Geological Survey celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2013, tracing
our origins back to the creation of the Office of Territorial Geologist in
1888, 25 years before Arizona became a state.
Over this time we underwent a number of transformations, moving into the
University of Arizona in 1893, where we served under a variety of names but for
the longest period as the Arizona Bureau of Mines. For the last 25 years we have been an
independent agency reporting directly to the Governor, one of only two state
geological surveys in the nation in that position.
My
colleague Priscilla Grew, when she was State Geologist of Minnesota, was asked
by a state legislator when her organization would be finished carrying out its
geologic survey of the state. She famously replied, “When you’re finished
legislating.” While that may initially sound flippant or harsh, Priscilla made an important observation. The world changes in unexpected ways and we have to continually deal with unpredicted and unpredictable events.
During
the the last 125 years, our mission has grown and evolved, in response to changing needs of
our society and environment. When
Arizona became a state in 1912, more than 40% of the residents were involved in
mining and we focused on basic geologic mapping and identification and
assessment of mineral resources. We
continue to carry out those tasks with a lot more work still needed to be done. Arizona is consistently the number 1 or 2
non-fuel mineral producing state in the country, yet only about one-quarter of
the geology of the state is mapped at a scale of 1:24,000 or better. But we also are deeply involved in natural
hazards assessment and mitigation, groundwater geology, environmental geology,
and the rapidly growing field of geoinformatics, or geoscience
cyberinfrastructure including making all of our data and reports digital, online, and interoperable with one another.
In
this, our 125th anniversary year, we are celebrating the efforts of hundreds of
geologists and geoscientists to understand Arizona’s remarkable geology and
apply that knowledge to making our lives safer and richer. All told, AZGS and its predecessor agencies
have published more than 1,000 geologic products – maps, reports, assessments,
etc. As we continue to respond to new demands and take advantage of new
technologies, we’ll be creating new products and establishing new communication
pathways to serve Arizona. All of our publications are now digital and
put online as soon as they are released.
A lot of our work is communicated to our constituents through electronic
and social media, including blogs, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and a new online
video magazine, “Arizona Mining Review.”
AZGS
continues to play a prominent role with Arizona’s natural resources and natural
hazards. Among some of the more notable accomplishments this past year are:
- Approaching 1,000 AZGS publications place in an online document repository for free downloading, encompassing almost all AZGS documents dating from 1915 to present
- Issuance of 33 drilling permits for the Arizona Oil & Gas Conservation Commission, primarily for potash exploration core holes in the Holbrook basin
- Release of online interactive map viewers of Arizona natural hazards, oil and gas wells, and the state geologic map
- Successful deployment of the $22 million National Geothermal Data System project (with 965 data sets representing over 5.6 million data points posted from over 60 data providers in all 50 states, with hundreds of more datasets under review, a large number of standardized web services enabled, and over 100 geologic and gravity web map services online
- Completion of the inventorying and partial scanning of over 800,000 documents, 10,000 maps, and 7,500 historical photos from the collections of the Arizona Dept. of Mines & Mineral Resources, acquired through the merger of the agencies
- Mapping of new earth fissures in Cochise County and updating existing maps throughout Arizona, all available online in an interactive map viewer
- Took a leadership role in organizing the national geoscience cyberinfrastructure under the National Science Foundation’s EarthCube program
Over
the past year, AZGS has continued to grow due to our success in bringing in
external funds to support and underwrite our work on state priorities. This allowed us as one example, to continue operations
without any direct state or federal financial support, of the Arizona Broadband Seismic Network, the first statewide earthquake
monitoring system.
AZGS has
maintained services and expanded into new areas during the economic recession
by creative, entrepreneurial, and aggressive pursuit of new funding
opportunities. In FY13, AZGS raised
90%+ of its total budget from grants, contracts, and cooperative agreements,
mostly from federal sources, and almost entirely through competitive
solicitations. We started FY13 with
about three-quarters of the annual budget revenues in place and raised
sufficient funds during the year to meet all obligations.
We started
FY14 with funding in place or committed to fund the Survey for the full
year. We continue to be
successful in moving from a primarily state-funded to a grant-funded mode of
operation. One of our challenges is to maintain this level of fund-raising to
help us meet Arizona’s existing, continually growing, and evolving needs.
There are many more chapters in the story to tell. Stay tuned, and happy new year!
