Chris Rowan is a geologist specialising in the dark arts of paleomagnetism, and getting people to pay him to travel to exotic destinations for fieldwork. Having drilled up New Zealand during his PhD, and South Africa in his first post-doc, he now works at the University of Edinburgh.
Anne Jefferson has a love of all things water-related and blends hydrology, geomorphology, geology, and climate change in her work. She has a Ph.D. from Oregon State University and is now an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.Just like Kim, Alessia, and Hypocentre, I've been having fun with the One Geology portal, which presents the first incarnation of the project to create the world's first online, global, geological map. You can even download geological overlays for Google Earth, which is so cool that I'll forgive the fact that the portal doesn't yet work with Firefox 3, which has forced me to dust the electronic cobwebs off Internet Explorer*
Anyway, here's the geology beneath my feet right now:
The circular green and pink area in the bottom right (north-east) corner is granite-greenstone basement which formed 3-3.1 billion (3000-3100 million) years ago. The different-coloured concentric bands surrounding this (starting with yellow, ending with orange) are the various units of the Witwatersrand Supergroup, a cratonic cover sequence which is the same age as the Pongola rocks that I've been studying during my time here; both sequences were probably originally deposited in a single basin, which has since been dismembered by later geological happenings. Gold-bearing conglomerates in the Witwatersrand - the source of 40% of all the gold ever mined - are the reason for Johannesburg's existence. As you can see, the University (and my current abode) are located - appropriately enough - on top of the lowest unit of the Witwatersrand. Younger sequences (by South African standards - virtually every unit in this image is more than 2.3 billion years old) can be seen around the western and southern edges.
Given that these are still the very early days of this project, I'm getting very excited about what geological goodies we'll see online in the future.
*If that turns your stomach, according to Hypocentre the Flock social browser, which is based on Firefox 2, also works.
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This application is optimized for IE6, IE7, Flock 1.2 and Firefox 2.
They need help. In a big way. They need to get out of the dark ages.
Posted by: BlindRobin | August 5, 2008 2:16 PM
Damn, NZ's GNS hasn't uploaded the detailed data for New Zealand's geology. I so want to look at the lovely twisted landforms in the Castle hill in google earth :(
Posted by: Nick Sullivan | August 6, 2008 1:36 AM
A little bit of playing around on this post, too! It's way cool and lots of fun.
Posted by: Silver Fox | August 6, 2008 8:27 AM
Re: Firefox 3 if you get the IE Tab extension for Firefox it will display the one world geology portal.
Posted by: CamArchGrad | August 19, 2008 4:04 PM