Reaching out and under

A number of European Geological Surveys have now reached the conclusion that in order to truly meet the needs of society it is no longer enough to produce geological maps, or digital geological maps, or even applied thematic data within a GIS. Even the latter is often insufficient to fully explain the relevance of our science to a particular problem. We need to reach out even further if we want to get our message across. The “understanding gap” between the tiny minority in society who are trained geoscientists and the overwhelming majority who are not, is huge, and we geoscientists have to be innovative and imaginative and flexible if we want to bridge that gap. This short paper describes two very different initiatives from the UK. The first is the development of an automated reporting system for ground stability for the British house buying and selling market – a system that has the capacity to automatically deliver a report on geo-hazards for every house transaction that takes place in one year; ie 1.4 million reports or over 5000 reports per working day. The second initiative is completely different and for a completely different set of users – it is a system to allow users to have easy, intuitive and dynamic access to 3 dimensional geological models and to create their own maps, or sections or even virtual boreholes. Finally, the paper will take a brief look at future developments.