Digital Products

Primary Product:

Geologic Animations for National Parks Visitor Centers and Museums:

These high quailty animations are 5-10 minutes in length. Their purpose is to provide a short display that a person in the park's Visitor Center or a museum would be interested in watching. The animations will help visitors understand the basic principles of geology and the geologic evolution of the area they are visiting. It should be noted that the animations will each include a narration which summarizes (using terms that a non-geologist can understand) what is being shown.

Secondary Products:

Interactive displays and web deliverables

By creating interactive web deliverable versions of the animations we hope to increase the impact of the project. We are also working to create interactive modules for a number of parks that exlpain the geologic highlights of the parks. A test case interactive module is currently being created for Canyonlands NP.

User-controlled flyovers:

We plan to construct a series of interactive displays for the parks that will allow the user to display different kinds of surfaces and explore the current geography and geology of the area. The display consists of 3-D visualization software for PCs that allows the user to control a flyover of the National Park, where different kinds of map displays are draped over a digital terrain model. The different maps include: Landsat images, shaded topography, and geologic maps with geologic cross sections that can be brought into the area. These maps are placed in an interactive 3-D program with controls that allow users to investigate whatever area they wish within the Park.

Geologic animations of North America:

We hope to construct a series of animations of each major geologic period of North America The purpose is to illustrate the geologic evolution of North America with an accuracy of 2-3 million years, from a viewpoint of 50 km in space (satellite view). These will be used to place each National Park into a broader regional context, and illustrate to the viewer the constantly changing nature of the continent. These regional animations are constructed from numerous sources. The initial maps used for each period are from Cook and Bally (1975). These maps are then modified with the input from more recent geologic literature, as well as experts in the field.