A picture is worth a thousand words, or a thousand Hexagons

The British Geological Survey recently undertook a project to evaluate and explore the visual communication techniques for scientific data; hexagon grids proved to be one of the most popular results from this exercise. The study focussed on delivering a set of easy to interpret, generalised outputs which would enable a broad audience to grasp scientific concepts. We explored seven of the current geohazard resources (see inset box below). The resulting hexagon grids provide a visually striking yet simple mechanism, populated with a pared down version of existing complex geological data.