Coal is found in Mississippian, Jurassic, Cretaceous and Tertiary non-marine sequences which underlie as much as 37,000 km² of the Yukon Territory (Long, 1985). However, very little of this vast area of potential coal-bearing rocks has been examined in any detail and the extent of coal deposits is largely unknown.
Coal occurrences are known in seven areas: 1) in the Paleogene Amphitheatre Formation in the Kluane area; 2) within Jura-Cretaceous sedimentary rocks of the Laberge Group and Tantalus Formation deposited in the Whitehorse trough in the Carmacks, Braeburn and Whitehorse areas; 3) in Tertiary sedimentary rocks in the Dawson, Pelly River, Ross River and Watson Lake areas located in the Tintina Trench; 4) within Late Cretaceous sedimentary rocks in the Indian River area; 5) in Eocene sedimentary rocks of the Rock River Basin; 6) within the mid-Cretaceous to Tertiary strata of the Bonnet Plume basin; and 7) in Mississippian sedimentary rocks of the Kayak Formation in northern Yukon.
Minor coal is also known to exist in Mississippian map unit Mo. (Norris, 1982) in the Snake River area; in the Neocomian "coal-bearing division" (Jeletzky, 1961; Norris, 1981) in the northern Richardson Mountains; in the Upper Cretaceous Moose Channel Formation in the northernmost Yukon; and within Paleocene Reindeer Formation in the Mackenzie Delta area.
The Mississipian Mattson Formation, which hosts coal in the Northwest Territories, is known to occur in the southeastern Yukon, however no coal occurrences of any significance have been noted in the Yukon portion.
This report is accompanied by a 1:2 000 000-scale Yukon Coal Inventory map including coal occurrences for the Yukon Territory.
