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
Callan – This MAGIC project of “yours” is A-1, special, top of the line, for geoscience education. I would hope that you could enlist some geo people at Va Tech and UVa to get involved with this (maybe Dave Spears can help out with VPI end of that). I know that this is something that Byron Cooper and Dave Wones would have endorsed. Wow, really exciting!
Thanks. Dave Spears is totally on board, and has promised to help facilitate access to private quarries, etc.