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Introduction: Unlocking 3D earth systems—Harnessing new digital technologies to revolutionize multi-scale geological models

¹ UNM Lidar Lab, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 89131, USA
² Geospatial Research Ltd., Earth Sciences, University of Durham, Durham DH1 3LE, UK
³ Reactivation Research Group, Earth Sciences, University of Durham, Durham DH1 3LE, UK
⁴ e-Science Institute, University of Durham, Durham DH1 3LE, UK
⁵ Reactivation Research Group, Earth Sciences, University of Durham, Durham DH1 3LE, UK

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Driven by the popularity of easily accessible desktop tools such as Google Earth and in-car satellite navigation systems, we are currently experiencing a global geospatial revolution. In parallel, many areas of geoscience now currently routinely use geographic information systems (GIS) software and geospatial data for the visualization and analysis of spatial data. Recent related developments in digital technologies are also heralding significant changes in the way we acquire, visualize, and analyze geological field data. These new methods have the potential to improve the geospatial analysis of earth systems, comparable to the way in which advances in geochronologic and chronostratigraphic methods have increased our temporal constraints. A GSA Penrose Conference held in Durham, UK, in September 2006, brought together about 50 delegates whose contributions provided a detailed view of a wide variety of digital field technologies, and showed the current state-of-the-art in the application of geospatial methods across many diverse branches of geoscience (McCaffrey et al., 2007). This Geosphere themed issue contains a number of papers based on contributions made at the conference. A field excursion held in conjunction with the conference was a catalyst not only for "on-the-outcrop" discussion, but also an opportunity for acquisition of data that appears in two of the papers presented here (e.g., Bond et al.).

Geospatial data has long been available from global to regional scales, but the advent of portable, field-based hardware has introduced the ability to routinely analyze outcrop-scale geospatial data. Most of the contributions in this volume are primarily concerned with data at the outcrop scale, corresponding more closely to the scales of observation typically associated with traditional geological field mapping. Consequently, several of the papers address different facets of terrestrial laser scanning (mobile ground-based lidar), since this is proving to be a powerful, rapid and versatile method of acquiring . . . [Full Text of this Article]