HIGH RESOLUTION DIGITAL MAPPING OF THE EASTERN WICHITA MOUNTAINS, SOUTHERN OKLAHOMA

The Wichita Mountains of southwestern Oklahoma are dominated by the exposed magmatic products of Cambrian rifting, and serve as a natural laboratory for resolving the emplacement and crystallization of shallow granite bodies. These igneous rocks were further buried under early Paleozoic carbonate-dominated sediments. The mountains are in part a product of late-Paleozoic uplift and further reflect deformation of the Laurentian interior during Pangean assembly. Current work strives to refine the 1:100 000 Lawton map of Stanley et al., 2005 (OGS) by incorporating finer scale mapping into a GIS product at 1:24 000 (7.5' quadrangle) scale. Detailed GIS mapping provides an excellent record of the distributed surface geology, permitting detailed evaluation of the events that formed the rocks and landforms.

The eastern Wichita Mountains provide the greatest exposure of the magmatic rocks, and includes a number of locations detailed by decimeter-scale mapping. This project is directly translating these efforts from paper to the GIS environment at their individual published scale. These regions are largely joined by 1:12 000 and 1:24 000 surface mapping and discreet GNSS geolocations, with reference to multi-sourced remote imagery. The map resolves individual lithodemic- and formation-level units by incorporating the geochemical and petrographic evaluation of broadly distributed samples. The map further resolves sub-lithodemic features of the granites, key to understanding their origins and emplacement.