BGS: education through open doors and OpenGeoscience

The British Geological Survey (BGS) has supported geoscience education since it opened the Museum of Economic Geology in Whitehall, London, in 1841. However, the BGS has taken some large leaps since the wooden display cabinets of yesteryear, and now the public can browse a geologic map of the entire United Kingdom on their mobile phones, fly over or under the landscape using GeoVisionary, or view and print our fossil collections in three dimensions. In 2010, the BGS opened its doors to its vast collections of data through OpenGeoscience, which has stimulated opportunities to educate the public through a variety of online maps and free data. The BGS also hosts events such as “Open Days” and Rock Detective Clubs and attends science fairs to demonstrate its latest research or simply to educate and inspire the next generation of scientists. But nothing engages children's imagination like the destructive power of an earthquake. The BGS-led School Seismology project offers in-depth learning about the structure of the earth through a set of simple classroom experiments and the opportunity to work with live data from real earthquakes. The School Seismology project has become popular with teachers around the world and will shortly venture into space to explore the seismology of Mars.