16 April 2012

Sharing the M.A.G.I.C.

Posted by Callan Bentley

Last Thursday, my colleague Jim Buecheler and I took two students (Robin Rohrback and Alan Pitts) down to Charlottesville, Virginia, for a meeting at the state geological survey. The Department of Geology and Mineral Resources sponsors an annual one-day symposium on Virginia geology that I’ve participated in two or three times before. Last year I gave a talk, at the request of state geologist David Spears. This year, I gave another talk, on roughly the same topic (GigaPanning local geology; what we now call the M.A.G.I.C. project*), and I was thrilled that Alan and Robin were able to present a poster on their contributions to the project, too:

Here’s a look at the poster, if you’re interested in seeing the details. Click through for a bigger version:

In my talk, I showed some screen-capture videos that I made using Microsoft Expression software (free!) while exploring the GigaPan website, and some of our M.A.G.I.C. GigaPans hosted on other sites, including this blog. I think it was well received. Alan and Robin reported hearing people utter exclamations like “wow” and “that is really cool” as I showed them the power of GigaPan technology to capture and contextualize detail. Here’s a shot of the scene as I got started, courtesy of Alan:

Other great talks included one on intriguing, and possibly hydrothermal, karst formations by Dan Doctor, a historical retrospective on the central Virginia seismic zone and the North Anna nuclear power plant by Chuck Bailey, and a phenomenally well done talk by Chuck’s student Kevin Quinlan, one of the Alberene dream team that I first met last summer on the Rockfish conglomerate field trip. He reported on his efforts re-mapping and interpreting the Scottsville Basin, a Mesozoic rift basin related to the breakup of Pangea.

I’m grateful to DGMR for continuing to host this terrific annual event. It’s a wonderful public service, and a real meeting of the minds. Do other state surveys host symposia like this one? If not, they should.

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* Mid-Atlantic Geo-Image Collection