Digital Mapping falls short

Much of the digital mapping would be edited so siesmic lines are not shown. Even current printed maps don't show the old lines I have on my early topo's. Google certainly opens up plenty of options for following faint routes but is impossible to tell if they are clear or if there are rows of trees growing in the wheel tracks as they so often do over time.
No doubt some mapping guru would be able to transpose the coordinates of the seismic lines off Google accross to the digital maps.
Cheers Craig..........

Hi Willem,
Have you looked at the 250K Geology maps? They at times have tracks not shown on other maps. Although they can be hard to follow at times because of the colours of geological areas.

Cheers

Phil

Willem,

It can be pretty tedious tracing tracks on Google Earth, but are you aware that you can create a .kml track file using GE that can be imported into OziExplorer? I've done it some time back and a bit rusty on just how I did it, but I think I used the GE PATH command, under the ADD button, then saved (open the left hand side panel, click the track entry in the PLACES panel) and save onto your drive as a .kml file. Ozi can read these.

Cheers

John

Gday old son
Do you want to talk to little Wes, he does that type of thing for a living..I should rent him out. I tried to sell him for many years , but no takers.
Murray

G'day Willem,

I agree that Google Earth is revolutionising mapping.

I am finding that I am spending many nights combing over GE and dropping markers on tracks, shot lines etc in preparation for trips.

By the time I actually drive there I feel I have spent many days there already!

Roll on high resolution imaging of the whole country. It makes such a difference to track visibilty.

I have also imported GE downloads into Ozi. I find the terrain view maps thus created to make the Natmap rasters look very ordinary. It would be good to have mobile internet access in remote areas to allow live mapping. Satellite connection is too pricey for me.

Bob

The reason the NATMAP products do not show all "shot Lines" as you refer to them(known as Seismic lines in NATMAP) is for what they consider to be a very sound reason. They are not just overlooked.

I can't recall the exact details so don't quote me but the story goes something like this, in the 1970's as I recall a lad drove down a seismic line that was shown on the map, for whatever reason. He got lost, his vehicle broke down, and he perished. Seismic lines are not always very well defined and many soon became overgrown unless they were used as tracks. It doesn't take much to leave a mark on the earth that an aerial photograph would pick up. Maps have a fair lag from the time of aerial photography to the final publication of the map and also the time between publication and revision can be many years.

Following a fair bit of questioning from parliamentarians, the coroner and others, a fair amount of introspective reflection and after a fair bit of s@#t hit the fan, the decision was made to only show those lines that were clearly visible and were likely to be visible for a fair amount of time. There are thousands of these seismic lines out there and many just fade away over time. Some remain as they may have been driven over periodically.
Again if I recall correctly the post 1997 edition of the 250K NATMAP maps had new specifications written and this specification revision revisited the issue of seismic lines and even more of them were removed.

I love Google Earth and wished we had it when I was making maps but a word of caution using it. You need to be aware of the age of the satellite image and allow for the age of the image when gathering information. I've found images that are 8 years old. The reason we get to view them for free is because they are dated images. Also be aware that the geo-coding of the Google Earth images also can be a bit inaccurate. Be especially careful where there is no road network to compare the image to because then you'll not know just how good the geo-coding really is.


Toolman

Gday Willem,
Lately, its been hard to keep up with the number of new seismic lines. Great Vic Desert has about 1000km of new lines put in over the past 2 years, on the SA side. Petroleum exploration. We followed a bunch on Google Earth after getting home from a trip last year.