In geological maps, the undulation of the topography is represented by height contours. These contours represent lines along which all the points have the same altitude. Height contours are represented usually by broken lines and the numbers attached to them indicate the altitude of the corresponding contour.

Landsat Thematic Mapper [TM) data have been used to detect the presence of altered rocks associated with ore mineral deposition. In arid environments, the spectral signatures of diagnostic minerals are often not masked by water, vegetation, or suxficial materials. There are many studies in which TM data have been used to locate hydrothermally altered rocks in near desert regions, but few successful examples can be found that relate to glaciated, vegetated terrain at high latitudes. In this paper, TM data, in concert with lithogeochemical data and field observations, are used to detect and map altered rocks in the Sulphurets-Brucejack Lake district of northwestern British Columbia.

Surface waters play an important role in relief formation by creating a multitude of landforms which depend genetically and evolutionally on the prevailing geomorphic processes and on the area’s geology. Underground waters, in turn, form a series of underground landforms and deposits which depend on geomorphic processes different from those prevailing on the surface.

When I first started conducting research in Mongolia, I found that I could make a room full of anthropologists jealous by telling them where I worked. To a discipline whose members pride themselves on working in exotic locations, Mongolia is a glamorous research site, for few Western and even fewer American anthropologists had worked there during the Cold War.1 Young anthropologists started to trickle in during the early 1990s: Norwegian, Danish, and French graduate students; Christopher Kaplonski, Peter Marsh, and Katherine Petrie from the United States; and, of course, the University of Cambridge research group (Mongolian and Inner Asian Studies Unit) headed by Caroline Humphrey and now David Sneath. So anthropology, my discipline, was becoming interested in Mongolia.