April News

Happy Birthday to the AAPG too! This year’s Annual Convention & Exhibition in Houston was an up-beat celebration of the last 100 years of AAPG history. Understandably there was plenty of reflection looking back at the many changes that the industry has experienced through the previous century – but equally there was also a strong forward-looking focus and an optimistic vibe throughout the week.

One area of particular interest that caught our eye was AAPG’s new Digital Immersive Geosciences platform, vaunted by AAPG as the “Future of Geosciences”. This is a great initiative, and one that lies close to the core of GRL’s business expertise: we’ve been pioneering new spatial technologies to capture virtual outcrop data since our incorporation in 2004, for use in virtual fieldtrips and to enhance quantitative geoscience. Since then have recorded digital data from hundreds of outcrops for commercial clients and geoscience research.

Main image (above): analysing virtual outcrop lidar data in 2004 in the immersive visualisation suite in Durham University (data from the 90 Fathom Fault near Newcastle, UK).

Fieldwork in 2004 – setting-up the lidar to acquire virtual outcrop data from the 90 Fathom Fault near Newcastle, UK.