Hugh Barron, British Geological Survey on developments at the BGS.

Good afternoon. I’d like to begin with a brief overview - a very brief overview - of what I think are the directions that BGS is heading in. We’ve recently published a new strategy – a 5 year strategy where we’ve identified 6 key challenges. The first one may seem strange - but it’s to be able to continue to collect the data. And secondly - and keywords there are accessible and interoperable – and we need to do better at communicating that data and knowledge to allow better decision making, so that’s another key challenge. Thirdly, we need to improve and enhance our external partnerships to increase the impact of our science – and I think the collaboration with EDINA is a good example of that. Another local example is work we’re doing on feasibility studies in carbon capture and storage with the University of Edinburgh, Harriet-Watt, oil companies, and power companies. We also need to improve what we call a whole system science approach to our work which is what we might call transdiscplinary research – where we need to get better at working with, say, economists, engineers, ecologists, and even social scientists – and we’re doing the very such thing in Glasgow at the moment.

What we’ll also be doing is increasing emphases on what we call the zone of human interaction – which is the top few tens of metres of the land surface. And that will translate into increased emphasis on superficial deposits or quaternary mapping. And lastly, but still important, is to increase the economic impact of our work so that we can still justify our part government funding or at least get less in the way of cuts.

The drivers behind our science and perhaps it can really be summarized in this single diagram – it really boils down to two main things, which is: resource security and impacts of climate change. These are the two major things at the moment. From all the way from carbon capture and storage, frontier exploration of oil and gas, where to site renewable energy infrastructure, where to site storage of nuclear waste, coal mining – or using abandoned coal mines for geothermal energy, through to impact of climate change on flooding, groundwater movement, frequency of landslides, and coastal erosion. And behind many of these areas, the way we can move forward is what we call process modelling. Before we can do process modelling, which really could be boiled down to the movement of fluids through rock masses in its basic form – we need to hang this on what we call a 3D geological model. And here’s an example from East end of Glasgow, beneath the proposed Common Wealth Games site, where we’ve been working for several years. The different geological surfaces are coloured up with the faults in red, we also do modelling of the superficial deposits- but that’s just a framework. On these frameworks we hang hydro-geological modelling, even thermal modelling for geothermal energy, and adding time series data we can get to true 4D geo science modelling.

An important aspect of this is our confidence in these models. So we’ve been working hard to describe that confidence in a GI format. But the 3D modelling, and the large effort we’re putting into 3 and 4D modelling, is really at focused areas – urban areas, key sites around the country – our nation wide coverage of data is really still at 2D or 2 and a half D format, and I’m sure most of your users are aware of what we call DigMapGB, which is not to be confused with Digimap - but we were there first I think *laughs*. But we also have many other products, current products and products in development. For instance this one called geological indicators of flooding – and if we look in detail…here’s a detailed zoom in of that – and more frequently now we are able to test that with flood events and you can see the concurrence of our predicted area and the actual flood. So it’s nice to see that – well not for those flooded of course but…*laughs*. Just another data set is Radon gas potential which is carcinogenic, and we’ve developed this jointly with the health protection agency. At the moment it’s available for the whole of England, we’re working on Scotland.

Other things- we have a landslide potential database map, that’s part of a series of 6 layers in our natural geo-hazards database. Here’s one of our geologists mapping the latest land slip, and if he’s not careful it will be his last. And another layer – superficial deposits thickness model. It’s almost entirely computer generated with limited geological input – but it’s a first pass. And this has recently been used by consultants working on the controversial Beauly - Deny Line.

Other things, we have offshore datasets. This is what we call our ‘DigSBS’ – seabed, sediment map at 250k scale. And we’re working on filling in the holes there. For smaller areas we’ve also been acquiring what we call multibeam bathymetry data. The top is off the Summer Isles, and the bottom is Loch Lomond which we captured last year. We’ve just acquired at the end of last year a new craft to help us capture more data – so this boat will help us do inland lochs and shallow marine, or marine lochs really. And in spirit of collaboration, if anyone wants a joint project in capturing new data, please get in touch.

In development, we’ve got various products. But one that should be coming out fairly soon is what we call the soil parent material database – and from that we can generate a number of different layers. An example here is soil strength, but we could have mineral content or any number of other derivatives from this.

Moving on now to access to data – I think just before Christmas we launched what we call OpenGeoscience. So it’s a free service where you can view maps and also download pictures and look at reports – and even download some software. So, just a quick look at what we call the Geology of Britain viewer – and this is centred here on Pollock Halls - and rather than developing a key we’ve just basically, you click on the map and you get details of the geology. Are they superficial or bedrock? And on the picture side this is going back into the past, on the Cuillin Ridge in skye from 1892 – so it’s one of 20,000 images we’ve got available for free download.

So, that’s really just a whistle stop tour – very brief – on what we’re up to now and into the future.