Mapping the geological space beneath your feet : the journey from 2D paper to 3D digital spatial data

The map is more important than ever, but what it
can represent and how it is delivered is changing radically as
new geospatial technologies emerge. In the field of geology,
paper maps have always aimed to represent the complex threedimensional
world beneath our feet and make it understandable
to us at the surface. However, new smart phone mapping
applications enable us to take the map with us more easily and
to ask questions of it wherever we are, and to add our own
observations on to it. Digital survey and modelling technologies
will enable geologists to communicate geology in 3D for us,
rather than having to translate it to 2D; everyone will then see
the geology as the geologist does as we take visualisation from
the lab to the street. As an interactive tool the geological map of
the future will be very different.