got geoint?

Welcome to the Friday’s Food for Thought post from got geoint? As always, we hope that you all had a productive work week and are ready to coast into the weekend. Earlier this week, we covered a story about DARPA’s “Transparent Underground,” and how Geospatial Corporation has actually been doing the whole underground mapping thing since 2005. So, we wanted to take the concept of “underground” and take it to the next level. For example, why are underground bands soo much cooler than mainstream ones? Why do underground artists and designers seem to have more cred? And, are there any cool underground GEOINT trends happening right now? Well, we try our best to answer these questions in this week’s FFT post. And, be sure to check out the funny video at the end of this post.

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Fact is almost always stranger and more exciting than fiction. This is certainly the case with DARPA’s new initiative aimed at creating real-time 3-D maps that display “the physical, chemical and dynamic properties of the earth down to 5 kilometer depth.” Yes, that is correct. GEOINT is going underground. Literally. The project is called “Transparent Earth,” and it could change the face of GEOINT as we know it. As Wired Magazine noted, the earth is more than 3,500 miles deep, from crust to core, so DARPA’s plan would just scratch at the surface. But geologists and geophysicists still know very little about the day-to-day goings-on underground, even at a depth as shallow as 5 km (that’s 3.1 miles). The purpose of the project is to detect “natural indicators of subsurface activity,” including geophysical turbulence and shifting tectonic plates. Wow. This could certainly have a major impact in preemptive responses to disasters like the recent earth quake in Haiti.

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