Description

In Alberta, the northern rim of the Athabasca Basin and the regolith underlying the Athabasca unconformity are locally exposed along the northern shore of Lake Athabasca. Extensive uranium exploration work in the 1970s, including scintillometer prospecting traverses, geological mapping, airborne and ground geophysics, and drilling, have documented several uraniferous outcrops with scintillometer readings of up to 10 000 counts per second, and uraniferous boulders and boulder trains with radioactivity up to two orders of magnitude higher than the background. Near the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, uraniferous boulders show geochemical characteristics consistent with a Saskatchewan source, whereas to the west boulders have a distinct geochemical signal suggesting a local source in Alberta.Six days of float plane-supported fieldwork by the authors iAugust 2004 confirmed the location of theAthabasca unconformity along the northern shore of Lake Athabasca and enabled examination of outcrops on both sides of the unconformity. Scintillometer traverses over previously defined radioactive boulderfields, and examination of the locations where individual radioactive boulders were reported, couldnot confirm the positive metallogenic indicators reported during the intense exploration in the 1970s.Uranium metallogenetic indicators extracted from industry assessment reports (location of boulder fieldsand individual boulders, drillhole locations), as well as mineral occurrences (including many uraniferous sites) identified north of LakeAthabasca by the provincial and federal geological surveys, have been compiled in GIS format.