Today is GIS Day. GIS stands for Geographic Information Systems and is increasingly important in todays interconnected world.
Smart phones, which most of us use, are location aware and loaded with GIS software such as Google Maps. We wanted to recognise the creative base maps available from Stamen Design. Here we see their Watercolor map together with our 20 offices.
Each of our 20 branches have access to their own Douglas Map landing page which provides local information pertinent for quickly assessing ground conditions in their regions.
You can imagine our excitement when we heard that Geelong had a volcano layer! Thankfully there are no active volcanoes in Australia that we need to be concerned about, although experts predict that there could be an eruption in the next 5000 years in the SA regions of Mt Gambier and Mt Shank. The Douglas Map volcano layer, when combined with geological unit information, is useful for gaining an understanding of the source of lava flows and hence where the resulting rock is likely to be at its thickest and thinnest. A typical example, in the area north of Colac, can be seen in the image below.
To celebrate World GIS Day our Newcastle office held a morning tea, to reflect on the advances of the last few years, and the increasing amounts of data at our fingertips. Tim Swavley launched a new layer to Douglas Map which provides the ability to directly click to individual borehole logs in our archive, unlocking endless possibilities for the use of our data. Since 2005 (when we started using GINT), we have 32,107 logs in our archive. This does not include active projects or the 25+ years of data prior to 2005. The archive logs represent almost 520,000 m of log data.
Tim’s interrogation of the data also enabled him to present an award to Michael Harris as the Newcastle Office’s Most “Boring” Person: for being the person with the most metres logged (11,217), and also the person with the most number of test pits / bores logged (1819).
Our morning tea included our very own World GIS Day cake, complete with chocolate “rocks”, thanks to Chase Benson.
