Global Volcanism Program: Current and past volcanic activity for all volcanoes on the planet in the past 12,000 years. Valuable Open-access data.“The Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program (GVP) is housed in the Department of Mineral Sciences, National Museum of Natural History, in Washington D.C. We are devoted to a better understanding of Earth's active volcanoes... Continue Reading →

Benchmark dataset of over 3,000 question image pairs for testing AI for geological maps. Microsoft Research, China Academy of Geological Sciences and Wuhan University have developed a benchmark dataset to test Vision Language Models (VLM).“Geologic maps are essential tools in earthquake prediction, mineral exploration, infrastructure planning, and environmental assessment. They depict layers of Earth’s crust—faults,... Continue Reading →

The International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) Executive Committee "unanimously resolved to suspend all formal links and activities with Deep-time Digital Earth (DDE) for one year with immediate effect". The IUGS Communique is at the end of this post. Some background below to the current situation. This includes links to three public discussions in scientific... Continue Reading →

Superb 'live' open-source interactive views of global weather conditions forecast by supercomputers updated every three hours. Choose to view ocean, wind and wave currents, space weather, chemicals, biology, live fires, particulates, pollution etc.Integrated is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Global Forecasting System (GFS), version 5 of NASA’s Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS-5), and... Continue Reading →

Geospatial Exploration through Natural Language Processing: Geological Inference from Textual Data using Word Embeddings.Interesting paper from Linphrachaya et al (2025). “By automating the initial stages of resource exploration, we aim to provide a tool that can streamline the process of identifying promising locations for further investigation. Given the critical importance of lithium for the future... Continue Reading →

Overlaying geological maps on topography. You can use Open Source PyVista for interactive 3D visualization and mesh analysis in Python. GitHub Python code and data examples for Texture mapping for a GeoTIFF on a topography surface in the comments. https://tutorial.pyvista.org/tutorial/03_figures/c_geological-map.html

Browsing around free open-access earth data with ArcGIS Earth desktop. Quite an incredible amount available but also plenty of opportunities for the development of more global detailed datasets.Link in the comments to download ArcGIS Desktop (its been around since 2016) in case you may have never used it, and what's new in V2.3 (December 2024).... Continue Reading →

Beautiful open access global multispectral satellite imagery in the Sentinel-2 explorer app. Included in the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World.The Copernicus Sentinel-2 is a European mission based on a constellation of two identical satellites in the same orbit. Each satellite carries an innovative wide swath high-resolution multispectral imager with 13 spectral bands for a... Continue Reading →