Last fall I decided that using UAS would really add to my geologic field work. That was the easy part. I did make the step to buy a drone and ended up with both a DJI Air Mavic 2 and a DJI Phantom 4 Pro version 2. Although it’s great fun just to fly a…
Category: Drone mapping
Siccar Point: A Day In The Field At Hutton’s Unconformity
Siccar Point is unquestionably one of the most important geological sites in the understanding of geological time. It was here in 1778 that James Hutton, John Playfair, and James Hall contemplated the immensity of time needed to produce vertically oriented rocks overlain by gently-dipping rocks. The concept of geological time is so fundamental to the…
Siccar Point – The Roots of Modern Geology
Siccar Point, located on the southeast coast of Scotland, is well revered in the geological community. Outcrops at this locale display ‘Hutton’s Unconformity’. This is an angular unconformity where tilted rock units of about 370 million years in age called the Old Red Sandstone (with a basal layer of conglomerate) lie atop nearly vertical strata of greywacke that…
SenseFly Drone aerobatics and oblique aerial photos
In all the bad press about drones, there are some good and exciting applications of this technology with the smaller, civilian-type drones. One application of interest to earth scientists is the ability to acquire high-resolution oblique aerial photos. One company, SenseFly, just released technology for this kind of drone application: SenseFly, a Parrot company, releases…