released by the Department in July 1981 advanced the next Federal lease sale No. 71, by 5 months to September 1982. Lease sales 55 and 60, for tracts in the Gulf of Alaska and lower Cook Inlet, respectively, attracted little interest.

The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which became law in December 1980, gave the Secretary of the Interior a number of tasks that require support from the Geological Survey. One provision requires that the Secretary study all Federal lands north of 68° latitude, except the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, to assess their potential oil and gas resources, make recommendations for the use and management of those resources, review wilderness characteristics, and recommend protective measures for fish and wildlife.

The Act also charges the Secretary to "assess the oil, gas, and other mineral potential of all pubic lands in the State of Alaska in order to expand the data base with respect to the mineral potential of such lands." In effect, this assignment will be carried out by the continuation and expansion of the Survey's Alaska Mineral Resources Assessment Program, which has been under way for several years. In recognition of this need, the Survey was granted an additional $3 million during fiscal year 1981, which permitted a substantial increase in staffing and the acquisition of some additional aeromagnetic data. As a result the amount of mapping increased by 50 percent over what had been programmed initially; more than 70,000 square miles were mapped at 1:250,000 scale in fiscal year 1981.

The Survey participated in two additional specific studies ordered by the Act. The first-the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Coastal Plain Resource Assessment-calls for an inventory of fish and wildlife and an analysis of the impacts of oil and gas exploration, development, and production and authorizes selected exploratory activity (not to include drilling) on the Wildlife Refuge. Survey effort during fiscal year 1981 concentrated on the preparation of exploration guidelines and an environmental impact statement on exploratory activities. Subsequent exploration plans will be submitted to the Secretary for approval. The second study, and one for which the Survey was assigned the lead role, called for the Secretaries of Interior, Defense, and Energy to "initiate and carry out a study of the mission, facilities, and administration of the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory at Point Barrow, Alaska."This assignment, a subsection of which will make recommendations for redirecting the United States Arctic research policy, required extensive coordination and discussions between the

Survey and other Federal agencies, State and local political entities, scientific organizations, and individual experts. At the end of the fiscal year, the study was in its final stage.

Mount St. Helens Revisited

By October 1, 1980, when fiscal year 1981 began, activity at Mount St. Helens had tapered off to occasional nonexplosive eruptions, in dramatic contrast to the shattering violence of the May 18, 1980, eruption, which devasted an area of 230 square miles, killed more than 60 people, and caused over a billion dollars worth of damage. In the course of the eruption, Mount St. Helens deposited ash hundreds of miles downwind in Washington, Idaho, and Montana, dumped more than 0.7 cubic mile of debris into the North Fork of the Toutle River (which, in turn, transported enough of it downstream to close the Columbia River to navigation at Portland for a time), and left the volcano's drainage area with a legacy of hydrologic instability that will endure for years to come.

Geological Survey activity at Mount St. Helens during fiscal year 1981 was concerned both with monitoring current activity and with assessing the aftereffects of the catastrophic May 18 eruption. The ad hoc organization hastily put together at Vancouver, Washington, in response to the burst of activity in the spring of 1980, was established formally as the Cascades Volcano Observatory; the observatory staff represents diverse scientific disciplines, appropriate to its task of observing activities at Mount St. Helens and other Cascade Range volcanoes and assessing and reporting on their effects.

To assist the observatory in its mission, additional stations have been added to geophysical and hydrological observation networks in the vicinity of Mount St. Helens, and installation of monitoring networks at three other Cascade volcanoes-Mount Shasta and Lassen Peak in California and Mount Baker in Washington-has begun.

Four flood-warning gaging stations were added during the year to the Survey's 7-station satellitedata relay network in the immediate area of Mount St. Helens. Additional flood-warning stations without telemetry and other stations measuring river systems in the ash-impacted areas, maintained as part of the warning and information-gathering network, bring the total numbers of stations in service to 34.

The six eruptive episodes that have occurred since December 1980 have been characterized by the formation of an irregular mound or dome of

Conversion to these streamlined leasing procedures will begin when the Secretary's revised leasing plan is approved and will be completed sometime in 1983.

The basis for the Survey's current efforts to identify and rework burdensome, counterproductive, and unnecessary regulations is Executive Order 12291, signed by President Reagan in February 1981. Much of the Survey's response to that order in fiscal year 1981 has been devoted to changes that will become effective in succeeding years.

Onshore, the rules governing Federal oil and gas leases are being updated to bring them into line with current practice. Regulations enforcing the Connally Act of 1935, which forbids interstate shipment of oil produced in violation of State market demand proration orders - a stipulation made pointless when market demand proration ended in the early 1970's-were eliminated. Another similar regulation dealing with the acquisition and leasing of water wells also was deleted.

Offshore, initial proposals include exempting the mature producing area of the western Gulf of Mexico from the requirement that operators submit development and production plans for approval; eliminating redundancy in environmental reporting; and providing for an extension of a lease period if inordinate delays have occurred in the issuance of permits.

The Geological Survey is also streamlining regulations governing reporting requirements, retaining only those that are truly necessary and identifying the least costly alternatives for its other rules. When the streamlining process has been completed, the application regulatory codes will be up to date and free of unnecessary provisions. A continuing review will be undertaken to insure that they remain so.

Coal Program

The 10-year pause in Federal coal leasing that began with a moratorium imposed by the Department of the Interior in 1971 to discourage speculative leasing of tracts ended on January 13, 1981, when the first part of the Green River-Hams Fork competitive lease sale was held in Colorado and Wyoming. The second part of the sale was held the following day, and the remaining acreage was leased on April 30, 1981. A second sale was held in Alabama on June 25, and a third sale in the Uinta region of Utah was held on July

30. Altogether, 19 tracts comprising nearly 33,000 acres were leased for approximately $25 million.

The resumption of active leasing by the Federal Government, together with the administration's strong emphasis on increasing coal production on both public and private lands, has important implications for the Survey's coal program. To meet the goals set by the administration for coal usage by 1985, the domestic coal industry will need to produce nearly double the 800 million tons mined in 1980, and the 10 percent share of that total contributed by Federal and Indian land leases also will have to continue to grow.

These prospective large increases in coal production will require additional knowledge about the Nation's coal resources (extent and quality, bed and overburden thicknesses, chemical properties, and other information) if informed decisions are to be made in both the public and the private sectors, about resource development, land-use planning, and evaluation of federally and Indianowned coal. In addition, the Survey's specific responsibilities for supplying general hydrologic information on all surface-mining areas under the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 will increase with the growth in surface mining.

The Survey's work in coal hydrology, which has been expanding since its beginning in fiscal year 1974, continued to focus on the Eastern (Appalachian) and Interior coal provinces during fiscal year 1981. By the end of the year, 19 hydrologic reports had been completed on major subbasins in these provinces. These reports and the 41 others planned for fiscal years 1982 or 1983 will summarize all pertinent hydrologic data on the Nation's principal coal lands.

In addition to the Federal coal hydrology program, continuing work under the Federal-State Cooperative Program on 77 projects in 31 States was aimed at evaluating site-specific mining hydrologic problems such as acid mine drainage, subsidence, impacts on local water supplies, excessive sediment in streams and reservoirs, and pollution from coal washing and unloading facilities.

The Survey's coal investigations program continued to identify and delineate Federal coal resources in the northern Great Plains and Rocky Mountain provinces and on low-sulfur beds in the central and southern Appalachian province. The data generated by these investigations are presented mainly in a series of map folios, predominatly at 1:100,000 scale. At the end of fiscal year 1981, work was in progress on 24 folios

describing the resources of the western basins and 4 devoted to basins in the Eastern States. Two folios (Denver East and Recluse in Colorado and Wyoming, respectively) were completed. In addition, work was completed on four Wilderness areas in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Illinois, and Alabama, and fieldwork was completed on one RARE II area in New Mexico. Fieldwork also was completed on five coal-resource assessment studies sponsored by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In these coal investigations and others, some 47,000 feet of test hole were drilled and geophysically logged.

Data generated by the Survey's coal investigations in fiscal year 1981 were incorporated into the National Coal Resources Data System, as in past years. In return, data from the system were used in preparing the coal folios.

Royalty Management

The complete overhaul and reorganization of the Survey's royalty management system, which began in fiscal year 1980 and continued through 1981, has been one of the most significant management-improvement initiatives that the Survey has undertaken in recent years. At the fiscal year's end, the Survey began its planned conversion from the early (1950's) decentralized accounting system to an improved interim phase which will be replaced, in 1983, by a highly sophisticated, computer-assisted operation administered through a headquarters organization and five field offices.

The new system centralizes all minerals royalty collection and accounting functions under a Deputy Division Chief for Royalty Management at the Survey's headquarters in Reston. The field organization consists of a national Accounting Center and a Review and Analysis office, both located in Lakewood, Colorado. Four Review and Analysis suboffices are located in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Metairie, Louisiana; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Lakewood, Colorado. Under the old system, management, accounting, and audit functions were performed separately for onshore and offshore leases at 14 offices in 11 cities. Conversion to the new system is being implemented in phased increments; already, three regional offices have ceased collections. All new or restructured components are scheduled to be in place and operating by early 1984.

Several benefits will derive from the unified policies and standardized procedures of the new royalty management program, including increased

income for the U.S. Treasury, the Indians, and the States; timely availability and processing of funds; increased personnel productivity; and a substantially reduced reporting burden on private industry. From the standpoint of internal control, the new system will assure greater security for the proprietary information collected, reduce the potential for fraud and abuse in royalty reporting, and provide better administrative control over activities and funds. The resulting reduction in undercollections, together with prompt payments and same-day deposits into interest-bearing accounts, is expected to add millions of dollars annually to the revenues accruing to the Federal Treasury and to other recipients of royalty payments. These payments, which were less than $425 million in fiscal year 1970, had reached $2.96 billion 10 years later and are expected to exceed $4 billion in calendar year 1981. Thus, as energy costs continue to rise, the Survey faces the next decade with an efficient royalty management program for its mandated revenue collection.

Water Data Telemetry

The Geological Survey's satellite-data relay network, begun in 1972 to expedite the collection of hydrologic data from remote locations, continued its steady expansion through fiscal year 1981 to include 380 collection sites and one groundreceive station. The ground-receive station, activated in Tacoma, Washington, in February 1981, receives data through geostationary satellite from numerous data-collection sites in the Pacific Northwest, including the flood-warning network surrounding Mount St. Helens. A second groundreceive station, scheduled for installation in Phoenix, Arizona early in 1982, will include support for the 45-station central Arizona floodwarning network operated by the Survey.

Of the 380 data-collection sites in the network, 105 are operated under contract by COMSAT General, and 140 others are operated by the Survey in cooperation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Twenty new sites in the Upper Missouri River Basin will be added under an agreement with the Corps during fiscal year 1981. This telemetered data-collection network uses satellites orbiting 23,000 miles above the Earth's equator to relay data gathered at remote sites to processing facilities, brings a real-time reporting capability to hundreds of stations; data gathered at these stations used to be stored on punched

tape and were collected at intervals of 4 to 6 weeks. The timely receipt of water data makes it possible not only to sense critical hydrologic events such as floods at their outset but also to monitor instruments daily and to identify sensor problems within hours rather than weeks.

Acid Rain

Several cooperative studies completed during fiscal year 1981 provided valuable new information about acid rain. For a number of years, the Geological Survey has been collecting information on the chemical composition of precipitation as part of its Federal-State Cooperative Program, most notably in Florida, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Survey hydrologists in Colorado and Wisconsin have been investigating the effects of acid precipitation on watersheds having limited buffering capacities. Data obtained from a reconnaissance study of snow chemistry in the Northeastern United States are being used to describe the occurrence and distribution of chemical constitutents in winter precipitation over the Northeastern United States from December 1980 to March 1981.

Hazardous Wastes

In July 1981, the Survey replaced the Office of Radiohydrology with the Office of Hazardous Waste Hydrology to coordinate research and investigations related to the disposal of all types of hazardous waste, both radioactive and toxicchemical. This organization change recognizes the fact that the transport of all types of waste through the environment is controlled by the same geologic, hydrologic, and geochemical conditions. The change is expected to improve the Survey's effectiveness in providing the technical information needed to alleviate a critical threat to public health and safety.

Work continued on the Survey's high-level radioactive-waste disposal program, which attempts to identify environments suitable as disposal sites for commercial power-reactor wastes. The geologic and hydrologic characteristics of broad physiographic provinces are used as a basis for screening successively smaller land units where potentially suitable repository sites might be located. The Basin and Range province, lying between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Ranges, was selected for a prototype study to determine

the feasibility of this method of identifying potential repository sites. A Province Working Group composed of earth scientists from the Geological Survey and the States of Arizona, California, Nevada, Idaho, Oregon, Utah, New Mexico, and Texas has been organized to conduct the screening and to recommend areas suitable for more intensive study.

Oil and Gas Resource Estimates

The first 5-year review and revision of the Survey's systematic appraisal of undiscovered oil and gas resources of the United States, published in 1975 as Circular 725, was released in February 1981. The product of more than 80 specialists in the 137 petroleum provinces studied, the review disclosed relatively minor changes in the total amount of undiscovered oil estimated to exist in the United States but noted an encouraging increase in the estimate of total gas resources. New appraisals of both oil and gas resulted in substantial differences in a few provinces, where the acquisition of new data permitted more definitive estimates. A comparison of the two appraisals showing amounts estimated at 95- and 5-percent probability and the mean value for total undiscovered recoverable crude oil and natural gas is given below.