Nick Rosser in the Geography Department at Durham University has been a long-standing colleague since early 2004, when he kindly let us use his lidar scanner (a 1 Hz MDL instrument!) to start scanning outcrop geology. We’re currently working with Nick on a very interesting project to monitor coastal cliff erosion by repeatedly scanning a…

The Jura mountains in SE France seem to be often overlooked by geologists drawn to the large-scale nappes in the main parts of the Alpine chain. That’s a pity, because there’s some fantastic scenery and a lot of fold and thrust structures exposed across the region that make good analogues for compressional belts elsewhere ……

It’s great to have been a part of the “New Appraisal of the Western Approaches Basins” project, which was completed for the UK 31st Offshore Licensing Round. Having started work on this in mid-2016, it’s rewarding to see the comprehensive project material that is now available for download from the Oil and Gas Authority website.…

Advanced Notice! … We’re pleased to announce an upcoming fieldtrip as part of the Geological Society of London, Petroleum Group conference on The Geology of Fractured Reservoirs. Since such a large proportion of the world’s oil and gas reserves are in fractured reservoirs, the conference promises to be highly relevant to the oil and gas…

It’s amazing what you can get done in less than 45 minutes using a drone! The deployment of 10 of our low-cost, high-accuracy GNSS ground control units not only enables us to achieve spatial precision of 1-2 cm in X, Y, and Z, but also allows us to offer detailed, rapid surveys at a highly…

Big Data from small sensors! We’ve just completed another successful ground monitoring campaign using our low-cost GNSS (GPS) units. The program, which provides post-earthquake monitoring of an urban area in the Mediterranean region, has now spanned many months of continuous, autonomous deployment – we have just re-visited all the sites after a gap of seven months…

Virtual outcrop geology – another nail in the coffin for real fieldwork? Or is it actually an opportunity for office-bound geologists to benefit from more field experience from around the globe? We gained an interesting insight to this question at Finding Petroleum’s Opportunities in the Middle East event at The Geological Society last week. As usual,…

A couple of interesting conference presentations recently … Firstly, our work using low-cost GNSS technology and lidar to monitor ground motion related to gas storage was part of a multi-faceted project with Humbly Grove Energy, Geoenergy Durham, Geomatic Ventures Ltd, and Durham University, and was presented by Jon Gluyas at the UK Energy Storage 2018…

As we reported a week or so ago, for the 2018 Janet Watson conference we gave presentations on both accessing knowledge in geoscience text using Natural Language Processing, and our recent work on virtual fieldtrips, in which we took the audience on a quick tour through some classic Zagros and Zechstein outcrop geology. There were…