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  • So lets see what's under our feet. Click on the map

  • and we've got Branscombe Mudstone Formation.

  • We've got the whole of the UK on here and we can zoom to anywhere you like

  • including your house.

  • My name is Wayne Shelley and I help develop Apps for BGS.

  • I'm really interested in maps and I kind of got involved in developing smartphone applications from that.

  • This is iGeology, a new way of reaching out to the next generation of users.

  • You can carry the equivalent of 200 of our original paper maps but in your back pocket with you

  • all the time. So you can interact with a map in a new way.

  • Say for example you wanted to build a extension on your house

  • it might be a very clay rich soil in which case you might want to check

  • your ground conditions are correct for building an extension or building a house.

  • It reaches out to a very very wide audience.

  • Structural engineers, environmental consultants, professional geologists, amateur geologists, students,

  • you know maybe if you're buying a house you want to know what the

  • geology or the soil type is under your house.

  • This is just one of our Apps we've developed over the years.

  • This is our mySoil application. Again you can zoom

  • in to your current location but this time you can see the soil conditions and this

  • will be really useful if you're a gardener. Where this is really interesting is that you

  • can upload your own data as well. You can see that we have lots and lots of data points

  • where users have contributed to their own soil map.

  • We also have a new application called myVolcano.

  • We will be able to crowdsource the ash samples that might fall as the result of a volcanic ash eruption

  • and that helps our scientists do a better job.

  • Most of our applications are available for iPhone, iPad and Android.

  • Smartphone apps are an excellent way of delivering information to our users.

  • What you're seeing is the culmination of around 200 years of hard work from our geologists,

  • drilling boreholes and just surveying the land, finding out what the geology is under their feet.

  • We want to give everyone else access to that information and make it as useable as possible.

So lets see what's under our feet. Click on the map

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