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.