Monday 14 May 2012

Using Maprika for Geology

In the last post I shared a video of Jeremy Young using the iPad (plus iPhone and Android) app Maprika on the Jurassic Coast as part of the Lyme Regis Fossil Festival.

Maprika is an app originally intended to allow you to find you friends on ski slopes, by taking an image of a ski map and allowing you to georeference it in-app by adding the same points on your map and on Google Maps. The app provides an easy to use interface that can switch between these views while you georeference the map.

By using this technology to georeference the old W. D. Lang maps of the Lyme Regis we were able to study the effects of coastal erosion on the limestone ledges of Monmouth Beach (including the world famous ammonite pavement). As the video in the previous post showed the change has been considerable - both in terms of the amount of cliff that has eroded and the erosion of the limestone pavement.

The photo below (thanks to Aodhan Butler) shows Sam and I standing on a line of stones that we placed along the cliff edge of the Lang maps - showing the extent of the cliff erosion.

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