Saturday, February 23, 2008

Creating virtual context for geologic maps

Geotagging photos, diagrams, and map excerpts is an excellent way to aid in illustrating stratigraphic and geomorphic relations to colleagues. I have recently been doing field work in the Lake Mohave area and have photographed some key outcrops (see related posts here and here) that may be of interest to colleagues who are also trying to understand stratigraphic relations along the lower Colorado River. The slide show below includes those photos and illustrates another way to share geodata online.



Want to see the images on a map? Click this link and then you can view as online photo album or you can view it in Google Earth for the full effect. In cases where high resolution imagery is available, it only takes a little geo-imagination to comprehend the context of the image. No match for a field trip per se, but I think that it is one hell of a lot more illustrative than a discussion over the phone or showing a slide in a talk if you are simply trying to share information about a key outcrop.

I am currently experimenting with integrating several of my projects with online geotagged photo albums that include annotated stratigraphic diagrams, photos, and geologic map snippets. This is in the interest of developing quasi-interactive geologic data sets available for online evaluation, commentary, and review.

1 comment:

Miguel Vera said...

It's great to finally find another blog that combines geology with everything related to GIS. Even though lately I only write about earthquakes and eruptions in my blog, I'm also kind of a GIS geek.

I too have been experimenting with the idea of geotagging geology photo albums. I've been using Flickr since I usually post photos there (you can check this map for example), but the problem with the KML export option is that it's not very dynamic.

Reading your post I've just learned that Picasa has geotagging capabilities too (somehow I missed it), and the KML export option works great, so I'm installing it as I write this, heh.

Your idea of adding diagrams and stratigraphic columns is a good one too, it should complement the images nicely and explain concepts in a clearer way.

I'll be following your blogs and posts from now on. Nice job.

Cheers.