Spatio-Temporal Cultural Geology Viewer

About

Spatio-Temporal Cultural Geology Viewer

Designed by Ben Sumpter. This viewer brings together terrain, geology, historic mining boundaries and three-dimensional mine workings for the St Just mining landscape in west Cornwall. It is designed for exploratory interpretation, discussion and field/research use on desktop and iPad.

Navigation. Drag to orbit; pinch or mouse-wheel to zoom; two-finger drag on touchscreens, or right-drag / Shift-drag on desktop, to pan. Click or tap visible mapped features to inspect them. The Measure tool snaps to visible 3D linework and collars where possible, falling back to the terrain, and reports both horizontal-plan and true 3D distance. All floating panels can be moved, resized, minimised and closed.

Data represented

Terrain: project LiDAR DTM. The surface is clipped to the parish on inland sides and retains an approximately 20 m seaward-only buffer along the coastal parish edge.
Historic mining landscape: 1857 mining sett polygons, labelled and queryable.
Mine workings: shafts, surface collars, adits and underground levels retain the full supplied source extent and are not clipped to the parish boundary. Only true surface collars are DTM-draped. Mine levels use their recorded elevation (m OD); shaft/winze/raise features that already contain source 3D Z geometry are preserved exactly as supplied; Z reconstruction is applied only to source features whose complete vertex sequence has no non-zero Z values. Adits are held at 0 m OD unless explicitly stated otherwise.
Bedrock geology: two independently toggleable datasets are provided. BGS Geology 625K supplies regional context. Pownall et al. (2012) supplies detailed 1:5000 mapping of the St Just aureole and is drawn above the BGS layer as DTM-draped vector polygons using the fill colours from Plate 1. Dated units from both datasets respond to the geological time-range filter; units without a direct absolute age remain visible.

Online map services

When a network connection is available, the viewer can add BGS WMS mapping, Esri imagery or hillshade, National Library of Scotland historic Ordnance Survey mapping, OpenStreetMap, or a custom CORS-enabled WMS. Provider attribution is displayed whenever an online map is active.

Sources & attribution

Pownall et al. (2012). Geosphere 8(6), 1467–1504, doi:10.1130/GES00802.1. Plate 1 geological mapping and legend are used for the detailed St Just aureole overlay; the web viewer reproduces the source unit palette for the mapped polygons.
BGS Geology 625K Web Map Service.
National Library of Scotland · Historic Maps API and georeferenced mapping.
Esri basemap services and terms; individual Esri services include their own contributor attribution.
OpenStreetMap contributors.

Interpretive use

The viewer combines datasets created at different scales, dates and levels of precision. BGS 1:625,000 geology is regional-scale context rather than mine-scale mapping. Reconstructed underground elevations should be treated as derived spatial interpretations and checked against primary survey data where precision is critical.

Coordinate reference system: British National Grid, EPSG:27700. Offline operation is self-contained; online basemaps are optional.