APPLICATIONS OF 3-D MODELLING IN GEOSCIENCE EDUCATION AND RESEARCH

University geoscience programs are experiencing decreasing enrollments in many of the major research areas, including Geophysics and Structural Geology, because they are not perceived by many people to be rigorous scientific fields. We suggest that this problem exists because we are not good at communicating our science and the public is unaware of how geoscience knowledge might benefit them and their community. In particular, our introductory physical geology textbooks have changed very little in the past 100 years. Most textbooks have about 25 chapters and the only “new” topics might be Plate Tectonics and Climate/Climate change. For example, the chapter on Seismology typically still focuses on the types of seismic waves and how to locate an earthquake using triangulation, with minimal reference to the high-tech applications of modern seismology. Similarly, the chapter on Structural Geology is a memorization of the names of structures based on 2-D images in the textbook. We would like to suggest we rethink how we teach geoscience in our beginning classes so that we can get good students to take our upper-level courses that probably do contain more scientific rigor. Our starting point would be to incorporate the interpretation of 3-D photogrammetry models throughout the introductory classes and even teach beginning students how to collect and process the models for themselves. Field trips should not be a show and tell lesson from the instructor, but rather something students have studied and worked on digitally before they actually go in the field and make scientific measurements that match what a scientist might do in a field research project. Evaluating student comprehension might include asking them to collect images and build 3-D models or identify features in models provided by the instructor and explain how they formed based on their relationship to adjacent features. The use of 3-D models in a modern introductory geoscience classroom would allow students to work with concepts that may not otherwise be taught until they were upper level or graduate students in geoscience. This would free up the advanced classes to cover material in more detail than is currently possible in most programs.