Events & Courses

Date, time and location

The talk will take place on Tuesday 21 January 2025, beginning at 6.30pm.

This is an online-only event, which will take place on Zoom. The Zoom 'Room' will open at 6.15pm. 

Event details

The Western Regional Group is pleased to welcome Leanne Hughes, who will describe the process of creating geological maps and how it has developed over the centuries.

Through two centuries of geological mapping, techniques have evolved from colouring in selected sections of topographic base maps to show the different rocks which lay beneath the ground to today’s methods of digital data collection to develop the next generation of geological output. 

The physical process of mapping remains largely familiar but the method of recording the mapped information has changed from a paper process to an entirely digital one. Traditionally the geologist was armed with a ‘fieldslip’ – with which they would proceed to pencil in the geological lines and observations as they walked across the terrain.

Today, geologists use a tablet PC to record their data onto a bespoke GIS. The tablet uses GPS, sketch tools, photographs annotation tools and layers of topographic maps to aid dada collection. The data collected in the field can then be easily converted into whichever format is needed, for a map, 3D, geological model, or web files. This talk will be a brief overview of the evolution of the map-making process and a description of the kinds of data collected. We will finish with a demo of where you can access all of this data online.