Geoscience applications of QGIS: a bold new world in mineral exploration
Boxer, Grant
Grant's talk was the third talk in the "QGIS" session at FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2019, organised by OSGeo Oceania and held at The National Library in Wellington, New Zealand from November 12-15 2019. FOSS4G SotM Oceania is the coming together of Oceania's geospatial open source and open data community - with four days of workshops, presentations, a community sprint and social events.
 Good afternoon everybody. You're going to visit the talk from a user. I'm not a developer so I know very little about all that good stuff that Nathan and I all do. Basically, I want to run through today about my journey in GIS and how it's sort of changed over the last four 40 odd years which has been significant. Quite a lot of you people might not have been alive then so I thought I'd give you a bit of a background of what used to happen in the old days. I've been running QGIS workshops for geologists mainly in Perth but also up the east coast of Australia and we're slowly getting the message out there that QGIS is a really good piece of software and you can forget those other ones you have to pay big heaps of money for. So basically I'm just going to go through who I am, give some people an idea of what geologists do because you might not be aware of the sort of task that we get up to. A bit of a history of the past and present, the way we did things and the way we do things now. How the sort of desktop GIS applications have really changed the way we do our work and the effect of the arrival of QGIS in our ecosystem and the opportunities for learning with QGIS and obviously sort of GIS implications and also how we make really great maps which most geologists enjoy making maps. So basically as mentioned before I'm an exploration of my mining geologists. I worked all sorts of fun places all around the world. I worked for 20 years for Rio Tinto, Sierra, exploration and coal diamonds and I got downsized in the late 1990s with a lot of other geologists with big companies and I've been consulting and doing other bits and pieces then which has been fun I must admit doing all sorts of things. And as mentioned I wanted to map in for years for 20 years but thank goodness QGIS has come along and saved me from them. And I'm now working, I basically say to me retired, it's an advantage of getting old and I sort of officially work a couple of days a week doing sort of consulting work. Then rest of the time looking after grandkids running them around and also doing QGIS workshops and fun things with QGIS. So just to give you a background geologists do all sorts of stuff. There are many flavours of geologists, some work in mineral exploration, some in mining geology but also in the fields like civil engineering and hydrogeology, planetary geology. And basically what we're trying to do is to characterise or we're observing characterise earth and earth processes or planetary processes if you're working with NASA or whatever. And essentially what we do is we collect field data, we compile past sort of information and field data that's being collected and in the case of mineral exploration we'd be looking for signs that might indicate the presence of potentially economic mineralisation. So depending on the aspect of geology you're working in, your workflow will be different. Field conditions can vary from very good, nice sort of accommodation, the tents or swag on the back of your truck. And we work in all parts of the world and what's good about being a geologist, the rocks are the same in Greenland as they are in Africa and all this sort of stuff. I've been very fortunate to work in all sorts of places. So for example in the top left here I'm doing some geological mapping on some diamond effer is crystallised in Brazil. The top top centre, that's not me but this is some drilling we're doing in the Kikimbila region obviously before all the Ocals and safety got too intense. And on the top right some helicopter sampling in Greenland a couple of years ago. The bottom left is a fly camp we had in Northern Territory in Central Australia. Some field mapping in the centre lower there around the Argo, Diamond Mine. And sometimes you really see some fun stuff. This is a little tray of diamonds that we recovered from some of our diamond exploration sampling. So we get involved with heaps of all sorts of stuff all over the place. So in a pretty digital age we used to construct our geological maps from aerial photograph in the blow ups, going up to the scale you want the map on and you had a transfer and overlay and your hand traced the features you saw in the field on the overlay and then that would go down to your head office somewhere and the cartographers would stretch it out providing you had some ground control points and rectify the image. So that was something someone else did. This is the area around the Argo Diamond Mine. When we first worked in there there was no survey control so we had to employ a survey to put in ground control points so that we could rectify the map, all pre-GIS stuff. So really exciting times. Some people might remember what this is, it's a library and the machine down there is a My Microfish Reader. And in the 70s and 80s this is all you had to go and access your data, to print your data out so you could take it back to your office and read through it. And this is the only way to access data before the digital age come along. And I remember I was in Dada Dara Salaam, Dada Dara Dara Dara Dara Dara Dara Dara Dara Dara Dara Dara Salaam. I was at the Doma in Tenshnear and I was at the mines department there and I wanted to see some maps and they basically went into a big room full of big filing cabinets covered in dust and that's the only way you could find out what would have happened in the past. I hope it's improved but I'm not quite sure how Tenshnear is going with all that sort of stuff. So this is the way we used to access data and we ended up with all sorts of crap all over our offices, big pile of reports or big pile of maps and we had to store all this sort of stuff and if you had all the maps you needed to know what the projections were and when the maps were drawn and you had to go pile it all so you could pass it on to the client when you finish your report. But basically what we were doing, we were looking at various layers of data and this is just an example on the right hand side I stole off the internet there but we got multiple layers. There's geology, geophysics, there's aerial photography, there's satellite data including multi-spectral, multi-band layer and then there's your field data that you pick up in the field, there's drilling data, rock analysis from surface sampling and all of this sort of stuff is spatial information. They all have locations and so even though in the 70s and 80s we didn't know what GIS was, we were still collecting spatial data even though sometimes it wasn't very well located. And so some of the information coming in all various forms, normally when you're in the field collecting surface data you have your notebook and pencil, you might mark your points on an aerial photograph or when we got really modern we had a GPS, it really saved a bit of time. One of the problems we had with all this sort of hard copy stuff, we had a large firing in one of our store sheds where we'd stored all our diamond sampling information and all that was completely gone. It was all destroyed by fire so it had none of the original day data that we could go back to if there was any errors in the data. So now in today's age where we have multiple storage and multiple copies, it's less likely that that's going to happen. So essentially what we're trying to do is to visualise the world in three dimensions and trying to get a handle on how all the different data sets interrelate in three dimensions. Unfortunately we don't have X-ray vision but that's really nice and just seeing some of the digital earth stuff that the guys were showing yesterday, showing the sort of the surface and the underground facilities, that's the sort of stuff that the geologists are trying to do in the head all the time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. And just a bit of history, before we had GGIS we used to have draftsmen in the offices drawing up hard copy of plans and that's all we had. The big change in the 1990s is that we started to get ARC info and then that was usually mainframe stuff and then it went on to PPCs so more people then had access but they still had to be fairly specialised. And then in the 2000s and PPCs become more and more common but there's also always a limited number of people that knew how to drive a PC and knew how to drive the software and also the software was quite, quite expensive. So the big companies had deep pockets, they could buy the licences but the small operators, the individual consultants, they couldn't really afford to shell out thousands and thousands of dollars for software. When I first purchased MAP info, discovered I think it was about $8,000 at the time and that was a lot, a lot, a lot of money for someone to shell out if you're an independent consultant. Plus you had to pay $1500 a year for maintenance and certainly with the downturn in exploration after the GFC and also in the last few years over in the West, people couldn't afford to pay that and so they used to drop the annual maintenance so the software got out of date. And there's still a lot of people using out of date software in Perth. Then Incun's QGIS, basically about 2015 a colleague suggested I try it because I really pretty disillusioned with MAP info, hadn't really changed very much. And when I tried it at a time it was a bit clunky so I didn't really sort of take it on with gusto but then in 2016 it really started to improve and then I suggested to the AIG that we should run some workshops and then sort of it's grown, it's grown from there. There's still a bit of resistance from people who are rusted on to arc and MAP MAP MAP MAP info but I think eventually in a few more years those people are going to die out and then the younger generation will come up and I think we'll get a lot better sort of take up of it. So just an example of what GOs do, we're fairly simplistic usually, we like to have maps with low locations on them so we know how to get places. We need to know where the opposition are so we don't go on anybody else's tenements and this is a background geology with expression tenements on. This is an example of some airborne magnetic data. This has been processed in QGIS so a straight sort of measurement sort of measures the magnetic properties of the rocks and if you process it the right way this is using a plug into QGIS called MAP Box 3 and that gives you a spatial Gaussian gradient magnitude filter which does what we want it to do. It's not what that's called by geophysicists but it does the same sort of thing so we can process this data in QGIS now and also being the ability to bring in live aerial photography and not well, aerial photography live web sort of connections and then we can import our photos directly. If your photos have got GPS coordinates embedded like most smart phone photos are now you can just bring it straight in with a little plug in and you can put it in your map window and you can exactly see what you're using. I use a PENPTX K1 DLSOR and that's got an inbuilt GPS so all the field photos can be imported directly into your map. Sentinel data this is some of the most sensing stuff so you can use band combinations to enhance the geology. This is the Gosses Bluff impact structure in northern territory up on the top and down the bottom you can see some of the enhanced stratigraphy and you can use another plug in to look at the 3D visualization of the geology as well and again if you can get the calculated 3D coordinates down whole you can plot the information below the surface. This is a Google image draped over SRTM elevation data with the drill hole and surface sampling information. We deal with heaps of different sources of data so getting all this compiled in is one of the big challenges for us geologists. So I've created this user manual here basically based on my workshops I've been doing to explain geological type tasks so if anybody wants a copy of that please shoot me an email I'm very happy to pass it on and so now the really important thing is that geologists can now handle their own data they can present it in any way they want and it allows them to free up their imaginations and they now have to know about BAP projections as well because that's really critical. There's been three so far in my working life and there's another one coming. So what people like about QGIS it's relatively easy to learn. Heaps of great facilities in it there's a great online community quite a lot of support and people are amazed at the responsiveness of using QGIS they have a problem they can post a question online but what we really want is a dual hole cross section and 3D display plug-in so if anybody out there that's keen to help us develop that I'd really like to get a movement going so that we can get this plug-in because that's the only thing that we're really missing from a really great piece of software and just to finish a huge thank you to all the developers and everyone in QGIS the people who have written those plug-ins are fantastic and love them all and the geologists of the world thank you all. Thank you. Thank you Grant. Thank you for your questions. Hey Grant. You've had some success with getting the Geological Survey Western Australia on board with supporting QGIS as one of its with their data sets publishing QLR files and so on. Just wondering if you have any advice for people who are in other jurisdictions who might be interested in getting their Geological Surveys to do the same. Yeah well we've actually got a workshop with the Western Australia Survey a couple of weeks time to take their people through QGIS. The people in Queensland and New South Wales have QGIS projects with QGIS symbology so that's really great for the Queensland and New South Wales people here. It's fairly quiet when I try to contact the other states I don't get much response but I think if you've got a load local group who is keen to push it it probably works better if you can do it on a load local sort of basis. If you know someone within the Geological Surveys or whatever go and talk to them and say QGIS is a great product can you help us sort of push it. I think it's a personal one to one contact that seems to be the most effective. Yeah Graham what features does QGIS need to take it to the next step for geologists. What's missing. Well what it really needs I think the only thing missing for it is this drill-drill hole package because it can do just about anything else that the other software, the proprietary software packages can do. So once we get this drill-drill hole and cross-second plug-in done then no one will bother looking at some of these others I don't think. But Graham what it needs is somebody like yourself or I who have used Discover to sit with the developer and explain how Discover works because what we're asking for is something that is not familiar for people who are non-geologists. Correct. So that's what I meant by the last point. Unless you've used Discover Vulcan Surfer or those other packages then you cannot visualise what you're asking for. That's basically why I'm asking support, maybe a group can get together where we can set out the specs, explain exactly what we want. There's a program called Leapfrog which is a really great piece of software but it costs an arm and a leg. If we can emulate that then I think we'd be very pleased. I've got more time for questions. Anyone? I have one. Thanks Grant. For me your presentation really gave a perspective. Thank you for that perspective of this where I came from, this where I'm going. I think about education. So what do you think should be done for, what should be taught to the young geologists? Because I said something about the next generation and making sure they use QGIS. What do you think are the methods to do that in education? Sorry, I don't know. About QGIS education and the next generation of geologists using the software, what do you think should be done? Well, I think one of the problems is that some of the universities are locked into Esri products and so they teach their students ARC. I've tried to do workshops in the Uni in Curtin Uni and they best said no because we're being sponsored by Esri which is really unfortunate but I guess what we can do, we can try and do sort of presentations on the software to some of the mining presentations like the geological societies and stuff and maybe try and bring up the level of knowledge of QGIS and so that people can see how capable the program is and we can only do it. I think like that.
 Good afternoon everybody.  You're going to visit the talk from a user.  I'm not a developer so I know very little about all that good stuff that Nathan and I  all do.  Basically, I want to run through today about my journey in GIS and how it's sort of changed  over the last four 40 odd years which has been significant.  Quite a lot of you people might not have been alive then so I thought I'd give you a bit  of a background of what used to happen in the old days.  I've been running QGIS workshops for geologists mainly in Perth but also up the east coast  of Australia and we're slowly getting the message out there that QGIS is a really good  piece of software and you can forget those other ones you have to pay big heaps of money  for.  So basically I'm just going to go through who I am, give some people an idea of what  geologists do because you might not be aware of the sort of task that we get up to.  A bit of a history of the past and present, the way we did things and the way we do things  now.  How the sort of desktop GIS applications have really changed the way we do our work  and the effect of the arrival of QGIS in our ecosystem and the opportunities for learning  with QGIS and obviously sort of GIS implications and also how we make really great maps which  most geologists enjoy making maps.  So basically as mentioned before I'm an exploration of my mining geologists.  I worked all sorts of fun places all around the world.  I worked for 20 years for Rio Tinto, Sierra, exploration and coal diamonds and I got downsized  in the late 1990s with a lot of other geologists with big companies and I've been consulting  and doing other bits and pieces then which has been fun I must admit doing all sorts of  things.  And as mentioned I wanted to map in for years for 20 years but thank goodness QGIS has come  along and saved me from them.  And I'm now working, I basically say to me retired, it's an advantage of getting old  and I sort of officially work a couple of days a week doing sort of consulting work.  Then rest of the time looking after grandkids running them around and also doing QGIS workshops  and fun things with QGIS.  So just to give you a background geologists do all sorts of stuff.  There are many flavours of geologists, some work in mineral exploration, some in mining  geology but also in the fields like civil engineering and hydrogeology, planetary geology.  And basically what we're trying to do is to characterise or we're observing characterise  earth and earth processes or planetary processes if you're working with NASA or whatever.  And essentially what we do is we collect field data, we compile past sort of information  and field data that's being collected and in the case of mineral exploration we'd be  looking for signs that might indicate the presence of potentially economic mineralisation.  So depending on the aspect of geology you're working in, your workflow will be different.  Field conditions can vary from very good, nice sort of accommodation, the tents or swag  on the back of your truck.  And we work in all parts of the world and what's good about being a geologist, the  rocks are the same in Greenland as they are in Africa and all this sort of stuff.  I've been very fortunate to work in all sorts of places.  So for example in the top left here I'm doing some geological mapping on some diamond effer  is crystallised in Brazil.  The top top centre, that's not me but this is some drilling we're doing in the Kikimbila  region obviously before all the Ocals and safety got too intense.  And on the top right some helicopter sampling in Greenland a couple of years ago.  The bottom left is a fly camp we had in Northern Territory in Central Australia.  Some field mapping in the centre lower there around the Argo, Diamond Mine.  And sometimes you really see some fun stuff.  This is a little tray of diamonds that we recovered from some of our diamond exploration  sampling.  So we get involved with heaps of all sorts of stuff all over the place.  So in a pretty digital age we used to construct our geological maps from aerial photograph  in the blow ups, going up to the scale you want the map on and you had a transfer and  overlay and your hand traced the features you saw in the field on the overlay and then  that would go down to your head office somewhere and the cartographers would stretch it out providing  you had some ground control points and rectify the image.  So that was something someone else did.  This is the area around the Argo Diamond Mine.  When we first worked in there there was no survey control so we had to employ a survey  to put in ground control points so that we could rectify the map, all pre-GIS stuff.  So really exciting times.  Some people might remember what this is, it's a library and the machine down there is a  My Microfish Reader.  And in the 70s and 80s this is all you had to go and access your data, to print your  data out so you could take it back to your office and read through it.  And this is the only way to access data before the digital age come along.  And I remember I was in Dada Dara Salaam, Dada Dara Dara Dara Dara Dara Dara Dara Dara  Dara Dara Dara Salaam.  I was at the Doma in Tenshnear and I was at the mines department there and I wanted to  see some maps and they basically went into a big room full of big filing cabinets covered  in dust and that's the only way you could find out what would have happened in the past.  I hope it's improved but I'm not quite sure how Tenshnear is going with all that sort  of stuff.  So this is the way we used to access data and we ended up with all sorts of crap all  over our offices, big pile of reports or big pile of maps and we had to store all this  sort of stuff and if you had all the maps you needed to know what the projections were  and when the maps were drawn and you had to go pile it all so you could pass it on to  the client when you finish your report.  But basically what we were doing, we were looking at various layers of data and this  is just an example on the right hand side I stole off the internet there but we got  multiple layers.  There's geology, geophysics, there's aerial photography, there's satellite data including  multi-spectral, multi-band layer and then there's your field data that you pick up  in the field, there's drilling data, rock analysis from surface sampling and all of  this sort of stuff is spatial information.  They all have locations and so even though in the 70s and 80s we didn't know what GIS  was, we were still collecting spatial data even though sometimes it wasn't very well  located.  And so some of the information coming in all various forms, normally when you're in the  field collecting surface data you have your notebook and pencil, you might mark your points  on an aerial photograph or when we got really modern we had a GPS, it really saved a bit  of time.  One of the problems we had with all this sort of hard copy stuff, we had a large firing  in one of our store sheds where we'd stored all our diamond sampling information and all  that was completely gone.  It was all destroyed by fire so it had none of the original day data that we could go  back to if there was any errors in the data.  So now in today's age where we have multiple storage and multiple copies, it's less likely  that that's going to happen.  So essentially what we're trying to do is to visualise the world in three dimensions  and trying to get a handle on how all the different data sets interrelate in three dimensions.  Unfortunately we don't have X-ray vision but that's really nice and just seeing some  of the digital earth stuff that the guys were showing yesterday, showing the sort of the  surface and the underground facilities, that's the sort of stuff that the geologists are  trying to do in the head all the time.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.  And just a bit of history, before we had GGIS we used to have draftsmen in the offices  drawing up hard copy of plans and that's all we had.  The big change in the 1990s is that we started to get ARC info and then that was usually  mainframe stuff and then it went on to PPCs so more people then had access but they still  had to be fairly specialised.  And then in the 2000s and PPCs become more and more common but there's also always a  limited number of people that knew how to drive a PC and knew how to drive the software  and also the software was quite, quite expensive.  So the big companies had deep pockets, they could buy the licences but the small operators,  the individual consultants, they couldn't really afford to shell out thousands and thousands  of dollars for software.  When I first purchased MAP info, discovered I think it was about $8,000 at the time and  that was a lot, a lot, a lot of money for someone to shell out if you're an independent  consultant.  Plus you had to pay $1500 a year for maintenance and certainly with the downturn in exploration  after the GFC and also in the last few years over in the West, people couldn't afford to  pay that and so they used to drop the annual maintenance so the software got out of date.  And there's still a lot of people using out of date software in Perth.  Then Incun's QGIS, basically about 2015 a colleague suggested I try it because I really  pretty disillusioned with MAP info, hadn't really changed very much.  And when I tried it at a time it was a bit clunky so I didn't really sort of take it  on with gusto but then in 2016 it really started to improve and then I suggested to  the AIG that we should run some workshops and then sort of it's grown, it's grown from  there.  There's still a bit of resistance from people who are rusted on to arc and MAP MAP MAP MAP  info but I think eventually in a few more years those people are going to die out and  then the younger generation will come up and I think we'll get a lot better sort of take  up of it.  So just an example of what GOs do, we're fairly simplistic usually, we like to have maps with  low locations on them so we know how to get places.  We need to know where the opposition are so we don't go on anybody else's tenements and  this is a background geology with expression tenements on.  This is an example of some airborne magnetic data.  This has been processed in QGIS so a straight sort of measurement sort of measures the magnetic  properties of the rocks and if you process it the right way this is using a plug into  QGIS called MAP Box 3 and that gives you a spatial Gaussian gradient magnitude filter  which does what we want it to do.  It's not what that's called by geophysicists but it does the same sort of thing so we can  process this data in QGIS now and also being the ability to bring in live aerial photography  and not well, aerial photography live web sort of connections and then we can import  our photos directly.  If your photos have got GPS coordinates embedded like most smart phone photos are now you can  just bring it straight in with a little plug in and you can put it in your map window and  you can exactly see what you're using.  I use a PENPTX K1 DLSOR and that's got an inbuilt GPS so all the field photos can be  imported directly into your map.  Sentinel data this is some of the most sensing stuff so you can use band combinations to  enhance the geology.  This is the Gosses Bluff impact structure in northern territory up on the top and down  the bottom you can see some of the enhanced stratigraphy and you can use another plug  in to look at the 3D visualization of the geology as well and again if you can get the  calculated 3D coordinates down whole you can plot the information below the surface.  This is a Google image draped over SRTM elevation data with the drill hole and surface sampling  information.  We deal with heaps of different sources of data so getting all this compiled in is one  of the big challenges for us geologists.  So I've created this user manual here basically based on my workshops I've been doing to  explain geological type tasks so if anybody wants a copy of that please shoot me an email  I'm very happy to pass it on and so now the really important thing is that geologists  can now handle their own data they can present it in any way they want and it allows them  to free up their imaginations and they now have to know about BAP projections as well  because that's really critical.  There's been three so far in my working life and there's another one coming.  So what people like about QGIS it's relatively easy to learn.  Heaps of great facilities in it there's a great online community quite a lot of support  and people are amazed at the responsiveness of using QGIS they have a problem they can  post a question online but what we really want is a dual hole cross section and 3D display  plug-in so if anybody out there that's keen to help us develop that I'd really like to  get a movement going so that we can get this plug-in because that's the only thing that  we're really missing from a really great piece of software and just to finish a huge thank  you to all the developers and everyone in QGIS the people who have written those plug-ins  are fantastic and love them all and the geologists of the world thank you all.  Thank you.  Thank you Grant.  Thank you for your questions.  Hey Grant.  You've had some success with getting the Geological Survey Western Australia on board with supporting  QGIS as one of its with their data sets publishing QLR files and so on.  Just wondering if you have any advice for people who are in other jurisdictions who  might be interested in getting their Geological Surveys to do the same.  Yeah well we've actually got a workshop with the Western Australia Survey a couple of weeks  time to take their people through QGIS.  The people in Queensland and New South Wales have QGIS projects with QGIS symbology so  that's really great for the Queensland and New South Wales people here.  It's fairly quiet when I try to contact the other states I don't get much response but  I think if you've got a load local group who is keen to push it it probably works better  if you can do it on a load local sort of basis.  If you know someone within the Geological Surveys or whatever go and talk to them and  say QGIS is a great product can you help us sort of push it.  I think it's a personal one to one contact that seems to be the most effective.  Yeah Graham what features does QGIS need to take it to the next step for geologists.  What's missing.  Well what it really needs I think the only thing missing for it is this drill-drill hole  package because it can do just about anything else that the other software, the proprietary  software packages can do.  So once we get this drill-drill hole and cross-second plug-in done then no one will bother looking  at some of these others I don't think.  But Graham what it needs is somebody like yourself or I who have used Discover to sit  with the developer and explain how Discover works because what we're asking for is something  that is not familiar for people who are non-geologists.  Correct.  So that's what I meant by the last point.  Unless you've used Discover Vulcan Surfer or those other packages then you cannot visualise  what you're asking for.  That's basically why I'm asking support, maybe a group can get together where we can  set out the specs, explain exactly what we want.  There's a program called Leapfrog which is a really great piece of software but it costs  an arm and a leg.  If we can emulate that then I think we'd be very pleased.  I've got more time for questions.  Anyone?  I have one.  Thanks Grant.  For me your presentation really gave a perspective.  Thank you for that perspective of this where I came from, this where I'm going.  I think about education.  So what do you think should be done for, what should be taught to the young geologists?  Because I said something about the next generation and making sure they use QGIS.  What do you think are the methods to do that in education?  Sorry, I don't know.  About QGIS education and the next generation of geologists using the software, what do you  think should be done?  Well, I think one of the problems is that some of the universities are locked into Esri  products and so they teach their students ARC.  I've tried to do workshops in the Uni in Curtin Uni and they best said no because we're  being sponsored by Esri which is really unfortunate but I guess what we can do, we can try and  do sort of presentations on the software to some of the mining presentations like the  geological societies and stuff and maybe try and bring up the level of knowledge of QGIS  and so that people can see how capable the program is and we can only do it.  I think like that.
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Good afternoon everybody. You're going to visit the talk from a user. I'm not a developer so I know very little about all that good stuff that Nathan and I all do. Basically, I want to run through today about my journey in GIS and how it's sort of changed over the last four 40 odd years which has been significant. Quite a lot of you people might not have been alive then so I thought I'd give you a bit of a background of what used to happen in the old days. I've been running QGIS workshops for geologists mainly in Perth but also up the east coast of Australia and we're slowly getting the message out there that QGIS is a really good piece of software and you can forget those other ones you have to pay big heaps of money for. So basically I'm just going to go through who I am, give some people an idea of what geologists do because you might not be aware of the sort of task that we get up to. A bit of a history of the past and present, the way we did things and the way we do things now. How the sort of desktop GIS applications have really changed the way we do our work and the effect of the arrival of QGIS in our ecosystem and the opportunities for learning with QGIS and obviously sort of GIS implications and also how we make really great maps which most geologists enjoy making maps. So basically as mentioned before I'm an exploration of my mining geologists. I worked all sorts of fun places all around the world. I worked for 20 years for Rio Tinto, Sierra, exploration and coal diamonds and I got downsized in the late 1990s with a lot of other geologists with big companies and I've been consulting and doing other bits and pieces then which has been fun I must admit doing all sorts of things. And as mentioned I wanted to map in for years for 20 years but thank goodness QGIS has come along and saved me from them. And I'm now working, I basically say to me retired, it's an advantage of getting old and I sort of officially work a couple of days a week doing sort of consulting work. Then rest of the time looking after grandkids running them around and also doing QGIS workshops and fun things with QGIS. So just to give you a background geologists do all sorts of stuff. There are many flavours of geologists, some work in mineral exploration, some in mining geology but also in the fields like civil engineering and hydrogeology, planetary geology. And basically what we're trying to do is to characterise or we're observing characterise earth and earth processes or planetary processes if you're working with NASA or whatever. And essentially what we do is we collect field data, we compile past sort of information and field data that's being collected and in the case of mineral exploration we'd be looking for signs that might indicate the presence of potentially economic mineralisation. So depending on the aspect of geology you're working in, your workflow will be different. Field conditions can vary from very good, nice sort of accommodation, the tents or swag on the back of your truck. And we work in all parts of the world and what's good about being a geologist, the rocks are the same in Greenland as they are in Africa and all this sort of stuff. I've been very fortunate to work in all sorts of places. So for example in the top left here I'm doing some geological mapping on some diamond effer is crystallised in Brazil. The top top centre, that's not me but this is some drilling we're doing in the Kikimbila region obviously before all the Ocals and safety got too intense. And on the top right some helicopter sampling in Greenland a couple of years ago. The bottom left is a fly camp we had in Northern Territory in Central Australia. Some field mapping in the centre lower there around the Argo, Diamond Mine. And sometimes you really see some fun stuff. This is a little tray of diamonds that we recovered from some of our diamond exploration sampling. So we get involved with heaps of all sorts of stuff all over the place. So in a pretty digital age we used to construct our geological maps from aerial photograph in the blow ups, going up to the scale you want the map on and you had a transfer and overlay and your hand traced the features you saw in the field on the overlay and then that would go down to your head office somewhere and the cartographers would stretch it out providing you had some ground control points and rectify the image. So that was something someone else did. This is the area around the Argo Diamond Mine. When we first worked in there there was no survey control so we had to employ a survey to put in ground control points so that we could rectify the map, all pre-GIS stuff. So really exciting times. Some people might remember what this is, it's a library and the machine down there is a My Microfish Reader. And in the 70s and 80s this is all you had to go and access your data, to print your data out so you could take it back to your office and read through it. And this is the only way to access data before the digital age come along. And I remember I was in Dada Dara Salaam, Dada Dara Dara Dara Dara Dara Dara Dara Dara Dara Dara Dara Salaam. I was at the Doma in Tenshnear and I was at the mines department there and I wanted to see some maps and they basically went into a big room full of big filing cabinets covered in dust and that's the only way you could find out what would have happened in the past. I hope it's improved but I'm not quite sure how Tenshnear is going with all that sort of stuff. So this is the way we used to access data and we ended up with all sorts of crap all over our offices, big pile of reports or big pile of maps and we had to store all this sort of stuff and if you had all the maps you needed to know what the projections were and when the maps were drawn and you had to go pile it all so you could pass it on to the client when you finish your report. But basically what we were doing, we were looking at various layers of data and this is just an example on the right hand side I stole off the internet there but we got multiple layers. There's geology, geophysics, there's aerial photography, there's satellite data including multi-spectral, multi-band layer and then there's your field data that you pick up in the field, there's drilling data, rock analysis from surface sampling and all of this sort of stuff is spatial information. They all have locations and so even though in the 70s and 80s we didn't know what GIS was, we were still collecting spatial data even though sometimes it wasn't very well located. And so some of the information coming in all various forms, normally when you're in the field collecting surface data you have your notebook and pencil, you might mark your points on an aerial photograph or when we got really modern we had a GPS, it really saved a bit of time. One of the problems we had with all this sort of hard copy stuff, we had a large firing in one of our store sheds where we'd stored all our diamond sampling information and all that was completely gone. It was all destroyed by fire so it had none of the original day data that we could go back to if there was any errors in the data. So now in today's age where we have multiple storage and multiple copies, it's less likely that that's going to happen. So essentially what we're trying to do is to visualise the world in three dimensions and trying to get a handle on how all the different data sets interrelate in three dimensions. Unfortunately we don't have X-ray vision but that's really nice and just seeing some of the digital earth stuff that the guys were showing yesterday, showing the sort of the surface and the underground facilities, that's the sort of stuff that the geologists are trying to do in the head all the time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. And just a bit of history, before we had GGIS we used to have draftsmen in the offices drawing up hard copy of plans and that's all we had. The big change in the 1990s is that we started to get ARC info and then that was usually mainframe stuff and then it went on to PPCs so more people then had access but they still had to be fairly specialised. And then in the 2000s and PPCs become more and more common but there's also always a limited number of people that knew how to drive a PC and knew how to drive the software and also the software was quite, quite expensive. So the big companies had deep pockets, they could buy the licences but the small operators, the individual consultants, they couldn't really afford to shell out thousands and thousands of dollars for software. When I first purchased MAP info, discovered I think it was about $8,000 at the time and that was a lot, a lot, a lot of money for someone to shell out if you're an independent consultant. Plus you had to pay $1500 a year for maintenance and certainly with the downturn in exploration after the GFC and also in the last few years over in the West, people couldn't afford to pay that and so they used to drop the annual maintenance so the software got out of date. And there's still a lot of people using out of date software in Perth. Then Incun's QGIS, basically about 2015 a colleague suggested I try it because I really pretty disillusioned with MAP info, hadn't really changed very much. And when I tried it at a time it was a bit clunky so I didn't really sort of take it on with gusto but then in 2016 it really started to improve and then I suggested to the AIG that we should run some workshops and then sort of it's grown, it's grown from there. There's still a bit of resistance from people who are rusted on to arc and MAP MAP MAP MAP info but I think eventually in a few more years those people are going to die out and then the younger generation will come up and I think we'll get a lot better sort of take up of it. So just an example of what GOs do, we're fairly simplistic usually, we like to have maps with low locations on them so we know how to get places. We need to know where the opposition are so we don't go on anybody else's tenements and this is a background geology with expression tenements on. This is an example of some airborne magnetic data. This has been processed in QGIS so a straight sort of measurement sort of measures the magnetic properties of the rocks and if you process it the right way this is using a plug into QGIS called MAP Box 3 and that gives you a spatial Gaussian gradient magnitude filter which does what we want it to do. It's not what that's called by geophysicists but it does the same sort of thing so we can process this data in QGIS now and also being the ability to bring in live aerial photography and not well, aerial photography live web sort of connections and then we can import our photos directly. If your photos have got GPS coordinates embedded like most smart phone photos are now you can just bring it straight in with a little plug in and you can put it in your map window and you can exactly see what you're using. I use a PENPTX K1 DLSOR and that's got an inbuilt GPS so all the field photos can be imported directly into your map. Sentinel data this is some of the most sensing stuff so you can use band combinations to enhance the geology. This is the Gosses Bluff impact structure in northern territory up on the top and down the bottom you can see some of the enhanced stratigraphy and you can use another plug in to look at the 3D visualization of the geology as well and again if you can get the calculated 3D coordinates down whole you can plot the information below the surface. This is a Google image draped over SRTM elevation data with the drill hole and surface sampling information. We deal with heaps of different sources of data so getting all this compiled in is one of the big challenges for us geologists. So I've created this user manual here basically based on my workshops I've been doing to explain geological type tasks so if anybody wants a copy of that please shoot me an email I'm very happy to pass it on and so now the really important thing is that geologists can now handle their own data they can present it in any way they want and it allows them to free up their imaginations and they now have to know about BAP projections as well because that's really critical. There's been three so far in my working life and there's another one coming. So what people like about QGIS it's relatively easy to learn. Heaps of great facilities in it there's a great online community quite a lot of support and people are amazed at the responsiveness of using QGIS they have a problem they can post a question online but what we really want is a dual hole cross section and 3D display plug-in so if anybody out there that's keen to help us develop that I'd really like to get a movement going so that we can get this plug-in because that's the only thing that we're really missing from a really great piece of software and just to finish a huge thank you to all the developers and everyone in QGIS the people who have written those plug-ins are fantastic and love them all and the geologists of the world thank you all. Thank you. Thank you Grant. Thank you for your questions. Hey Grant. You've had some success with getting the Geological Survey Western Australia on board with supporting QGIS as one of its with their data sets publishing QLR files and so on. Just wondering if you have any advice for people who are in other jurisdictions who might be interested in getting their Geological Surveys to do the same. Yeah well we've actually got a workshop with the Western Australia Survey a couple of weeks time to take their people through QGIS. The people in Queensland and New South Wales have QGIS projects with QGIS symbology so that's really great for the Queensland and New South Wales people here. It's fairly quiet when I try to contact the other states I don't get much response but I think if you've got a load local group who is keen to push it it probably works better if you can do it on a load local sort of basis. If you know someone within the Geological Surveys or whatever go and talk to them and say QGIS is a great product can you help us sort of push it. I think it's a personal one to one contact that seems to be the most effective. Yeah Graham what features does QGIS need to take it to the next step for geologists. What's missing. Well what it really needs I think the only thing missing for it is this drill-drill hole package because it can do just about anything else that the other software, the proprietary software packages can do. So once we get this drill-drill hole and cross-second plug-in done then no one will bother looking at some of these others I don't think. But Graham what it needs is somebody like yourself or I who have used Discover to sit with the developer and explain how Discover works because what we're asking for is something that is not familiar for people who are non-geologists. Correct. So that's what I meant by the last point. Unless you've used Discover Vulcan Surfer or those other packages then you cannot visualise what you're asking for. That's basically why I'm asking support, maybe a group can get together where we can set out the specs, explain exactly what we want. There's a program called Leapfrog which is a really great piece of software but it costs an arm and a leg. If we can emulate that then I think we'd be very pleased. I've got more time for questions. Anyone? I have one. Thanks Grant. For me your presentation really gave a perspective. Thank you for that perspective of this where I came from, this where I'm going. I think about education. So what do you think should be done for, what should be taught to the young geologists? Because I said something about the next generation and making sure they use QGIS. What do you think are the methods to do that in education? Sorry, I don't know. About QGIS education and the next generation of geologists using the software, what do you think should be done? Well, I think one of the problems is that some of the universities are locked into Esri products and so they teach their students ARC. I've tried to do workshops in the Uni in Curtin Uni and they best said no because we're being sponsored by Esri which is really unfortunate but I guess what we can do, we can try and do sort of presentations on the software to some of the mining presentations like the geological societies and stuff and maybe try and bring up the level of knowledge of QGIS and so that people can see how capable the program is and we can only do it. I think like that.
the talk from a user. I'm not a developer so I what used to happen in the old days. I've been also doing QGIS workshops and fun things with and I was at the mines department there and I various layers of data and this is just an so some of the information coming in all various QGIS. The people in Queensland and New South to some of the mining presentations like the