Virtual geological road in Cheremosh river valley, Outer Ukrainian Carpathians

Field research is an integral part of the educational process in the Earth sciences. Сovid-19 restricted our movement on the territory of Ukraine. Our team decided to create virtual geological objects. We present the results of creating a virtual route along the Cheremosh River.

The results of this road will be used for one of the educational courses at the Institute of Geodesy. In the summer, we organized several field trips to create virtual geological objects. The digital models created by us will become the main source of information for students. During the pandemic, we did not have the opportunity to make trips for groups of students and we forsee it. Thanks to the visualization of the outcrops, we skip the field stage for students and we emphasize the cameral stage in our course. In the first lecture we will tell about the idea and history of our creation of this course, give examples of programs and show the processing of data collected by us.

The geological outcrops we study are located in the Skyba and Boryslav-Pokuttia nappes of the Outer Ukrainian Carpathians. The stratigraphic section is represented by a flysch complex ranging in age from Cretaceous to Neogene. The second important complex is the lower molasses of the Neogene age. In outcrops we observe a number of structures that are important for structural geology, sedimentology and others.

To create our objects, we used two methods – terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) and digital photogrammetry (SfM). Both of these methods allow to gather collection of geological data on outcrops rapidly and these data have usually high quality. Information about the structure of outcrops is presented in the form of a cloud of points that allows you to build three-dimensional models of outcrops (DOM).