Mapping the geological space beneath your feet The journey from 2D paper to 3D digital spatial data

The map is more important than ever, but what it can represent and how it is delivered are changing radically as new geospatial technologies emerge. In the field of geology, paper maps have always aimed to represent the complex three-dimensional world beneath our feet and make it understandable to us at the surface. However, new smart phone mapping applications enable us to take the map with us more easily and to ask questions of it wherever we are, and to add our own observations on to it. Digital survey and modelling technologies will enable geologists to communicate geology in 3D for us, rather than having to translate it to 2D; everyone will then see the geology as the geologist does as we take visualisation from the lab to the street. As an interactive tool the geological map of the future will be very different.