What’s under your street?

07 December 2009, 11:53am

Discover if you live on rocks from an extinct volcano, in the middle of an ancient river or deep under a Caribbean-like sea teeming with exotic creatures. This is now possible with the British Geological Survey’s (BGS) release of OpenGeoscience.

OpenGeoscience is a new web service that provides geological maps for the whole of Great Britain, images from its extensive collection of photographs and a wide range of other digital information – all for free.

The BGS has been making geological maps of the UK for 175 years and this is the first time maps of such detail will be made freely available using the internet. These maps are based on the standard BGS geological map at a scale of 1:50,000. This enables resolution of geological details to about 50 metres on the ground – essentially street-level - a world first in terms of releasing country-wide information at street-level scale.

Since 1891 the BGS have been collecting images of geological interest from around the UK and further afield. Up to 50,000 of these images, now part of the BGS National Geological Photographic Database, will be freely available to download via the GeoScenic web portal as part of OpenGeoscience.

These include photographs of recent floods in Britain, erupting volcanoes overseas, cave exploration in Yorkshire in the 1930s and the British Science Association’s major historical collection of earth science photographs, as well as many pictures of classic geological localities and landscapes.

Dr Keith Westhead, Head of Information Delivery, BGS said “OpenGeoscience provides the public with a wealth of geological information including maps, photos and digital data, which they can combine with other environmental information to help understand the world around them.”

OpenGeoscience is free for teaching, research and other non-commercial activities. Dr Steve Drury, Senior Lecturer in Remote Sensing at the Open University said “It is a world first and, in my opinion, a development of major public interest by literally putting geosciences 'on the map'. It will become a kind of 'GoogleRock' for a great many people.”

Search for your own local area to find out more:

Edinburgh lies on an extinct volcano
Luton and Stevenage sit on the same rocks as the White Cliffs of Dover. These formed when much of Britain was covered by a shallow sea that was full of tiny animals which accumulated on the sea floor to form chalk
Spectacular examples of rocks which formed when lava entered the ocean can be seen on the tidal island of Llanddwyn Glasgow is built on the remains of an ancient tropical forest
Nottingham’s Castle Rock was formed on a wide plain with seasonal rivers much like the Colorado River basin today The Lizard peninsula in Cornwall is made of a slice of ancient ocean floor.
In its first release, OpenGeoscience includes the release of the BGS Digital Geological Map of Great Britain at the 1:50,000 scale (DiGMapGB-50) for free viewing and access via a web map service (WMS). It also includes the free provision of 1:625,000 scale geological map for the UK onshore and offshore, earthquake location information and samples of ground stability hazard maps. Not only this but OpenGeoscience provides software downloads to help geological mapping, free educational resources and access to the wealth of digital geological information and reports held by the BGS.

Professor Paul Smith, Head of School, Geography, Earth & Environmental Sciences at Birmingham University, says, “The amount of online material provided for educational purposes by BGS has increased very considerably over a short time-scale, and has the capacity to transform the way in which geosciences are taught in universities.”

www.bgs.ac.uk/opengeoscience

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