BigSurveyor: Geodesy Presentation

Friday, September 19, 2014

Geodesy Presentation

I was honored recently to be asked to give a presentation to the Senior Science Class at Ava High School. Mrs. Amber (Hendrix) Gieber is the teacher and the first portion of their class this year was about Geology. Now if you are one of the thousands of followers of this blog, you should recognize the Hendrix name. Amber's Father is David Hendrix, my first cousin on the Riggs side. Which makes Amber my second cousin (second cousin once removed if you want to get technical about it!)

Let me first state, I know very little about Geology, which according to Wikipedia is "the study of solid earth." So "what in the cat hair" am I doing trying to teach about it!?!

Well...I do know quite a bit about a branch of the discipline of Geology called Geodesy.

Geodesy - a branch of applied mathematics concerned with the determination of the size and shape of the earth and the exact positions of points on its surface and with the description of variations of its gravity field

Almost everyday, I use instruments that measure distances along the earth's surface and measure the height of land "above sea level". This is what I presented to the Science Class.

I set up all my equipment at the Militia Springs Park in Ava, which is near the High School Campus.

The equipment Left to Right: An old Sears-Roebuck builders level, A Trimble Robotic Total Station, A Nikkon Total Station, A Topcon GR3 RTK GPS system (Rover and Base) and far right against the fence-the controller for the Robotic Total Station

I asked for a volunteer to be the official photographer and I spent the next thirty minutes explaining how we use(d) the above instruments in our work.