Computational Geology: Live with the R&D team

Hello, everyone, My name is Jeff Bryant. I'm one of the research programmers for WolframAlpha. Today I'm going to give you kind of a tour of some of the geological functionality that we have within the Wolfram language, and also through Entity Value and the Wolfram Alpha website, as well as some Wolfram function repository items that are useful for exploring this area. And we're going to build things up kind of slowly and see how. How you can explore in this area yourself. So first thing I'm going to do, I'm going to share my screen here. So here you can see I've got just a plain white notebook here. So I'm starting out. One of the primary pieces that we're going to be discussing is all, you know, it's kind of the keel of everything is the entity domain, ge, geological period. So as with all the other entity value domains, you can just type entity value, Geological period, and you can get a list of the entities that are in that domain. So here you can see we've got quite a few different geological periods. These range everything from ages, like the first one there, the Helenian age, all the way up to epics. We have periods, we have eras and we have eons. So pretty much every different hierarchical level of the geological timescale. So this is quite a bit of data that can be explored. Of course, one of the things that's useful with all the entity value domains, as well as a lot of Wolfram languages, we have natural language queries, so you don't have to do everything programmatically. So we're just. Let's see here. Sorry, I'm using a Mac here. I'm not quite used to this, so it might be a little bit awkward here. You can do natural language by just doing control equals and you can type in something like Ordovician period, cursor out of it and it resolves into the entity. So here you've got an entity and one of the things you can ask for, for example, is the time range for that. And you can see the time. Time range over which the ordination period was valid. And we've got a number of different properties within this domain. So you can see we've got bedrock polygon. That's an important. That I will be showing here in just a little bit. We've got a number of biological events that happen. So for example, I just copy that, paste it down there. Once again, that's a Mac is I'm not used to yet. I've got to get used to that. It's command on a Mac. There we go. And I can ask for things like. Biological events. And you can see a number of things that happened during the Ordovician period. So you had the extinction event, the Cambrian Ordovician extinction event at the start. So that bounded between. You've all probably heard of the Cambrian explosion, so the period where that happened. And then at the end of that period, you had this extinction event that led into the Ordovician period. You had the first appearance of vertebrates. You had coral reefs, great diversity of trilobites, mollusks, echinoderms. So a lot of radiation of a lot of the organisms that we know of today and some that have gone extinct. The very first, earliest appearance of land plants happened during the Ordovician. Very primitive plants, but plants nonetheless. And then at the very end, you had another mass extinction. You had the Ordovician Silurian extinction event. So this is just one of the properties. We've got geological events. You can navigate and walk the tree. So we have properties like the, you know, the previous period, we've got the next period. You've even got data on changes in sea level, atmospheric oxygen, that kind of stuff. So quite a bit of data that you can explore here. But one of the things that I wanted to focus on is, first of all, I should point this out. This is the documentation center, so you can see reference.wolfram.com and I focused here on the entity type documentation for geological period. So this kind of gives you a good overview of all the different properties, entities. It's very similar to all the other entity value domains. So all the properties are listed here with short descriptions and then details, all the things that you can dig in and ask for for the individual entities. This is all just, you know, preliminary information before I get into the meat of the presentation. But it's kind of the backbone of everything. So this is how we started everything. I should mention a little bit about my background. When I was in college, of course, the movie Jurassic park came out and so everybody got very excited about dinosaurs, if you weren't already. You know, a lot of us are, you know, have fun with dinosaurs as kids. But I was at a lucky time in my life. Jurassic park came out when I was in college and that actually started off an experimental class at my college, Ball State University in Indiana. And they actually had an experimental dinosaur class basically in the spirit of the movie coming out. And that's how popular it was. And I actually got really interested in just fossils in general. Now, Indiana, where I was from, did not have dinosaur fossils. It's rare that you can find any place that has public access to dinosaur fossils anyway. But in southeast Indiana, they did actually have quite a bit of fossil bearing limestones in the southeast part of the state and the south in general. And so first, as part of the geology classes that I was taking, and also just as a hobby, I would actually drive down to southeast Indiana, not far from Cincinnati, about 30 miles away. And we would actually go through road cuts, just pull off on the shoulders, really wide shoulders. Public, you're allowed to pick anything you find on the surface. And I got extremely interested in fossil hunting. I actually have my own fossil collection. So I started learning a lot about the local rock layers that were, that were in there, their age, things like that. And it's been kind of an interesting hobby ever since. Every now and then, if I get a chance, I drive back to Indiana to those same fossil beds and I find them. And the reason I chose Ordovician period here is because the fossils that I found were from that time period. These are about 450 million year old fossils that I found. So that's how I got interested in this. Now, jump start. Years later, here I am at Wolfram Research, working in Wolfram Alpha content, primarily in astronomy. But as geographics came about, we wanted to be able to overlay data on top of geographics. And since I had a background in geology, or at least an interest in it, it became natural for me to explore that area and see if I could provide something that we could use there. So one of the first things that we did was we actually came up with a property that you can see here called continental plates. And so one of the things we can do here is once again, I'm going to take the Ordovician period and we're going to ask for continental weights. By itself, this isn't particularly all that interesting, other than what you get back is an association. And the association here is it's almost like a time series. We've got snapshots throughout the Ordovician period. And we have polygon sets or sets of polygons for each snapshot. So here you can see 445 million years ago, we've got a set of polygons. You scroll down further, you can see we have another snapshot at 460 million years ago and so on. So what you can do is you can ask for any one of these. Let's just choose this one because it's an association, you can just paste that in and you get the one set for that time period. And then we can surround this in geographics. Oops. And we'll just start here. This is, we're not done here yet. But this is kind of the beginning and how you would get started. So it shows how you can kind of build things up using the elements that are available here. So by default in geographics you get the current background, which obviously doesn't make sense. We want to see the continental plates for the Ordovician period. So one of the first things we want to do is we want to turn off the default background. Or at least change it to something else. We're going to say light blue. So instead of seeing the current continental plates, we want to see just the old ones. And of course you can start littering this with all kinds of styles. Brown. There you go. You want to see the individual edges of the individual pieces that make up those plates, all the individual blocks. You can set the edge form of those things. So there you can see the individual things. So just so you know, just so you can orient yourself here, what we've got here is kind of two primary areas. You've got basically this big giant area down here in the southern hemisphere called Gondwanda. And then up here you've got. This is what's called Laurentia. This is essentially ancient North America. You can see at the time Greenland was still attached. It's right here. And then there's actually you've got. Let's see. I think trying to remember some of these blocks, I don't recognize them from their shapes. Right now you've got things like Baltica, which is essentially modern day the Baltic States and Siberia, things like that up here, South America, Africa, that's all down here. It's all down. So the world was quite different. You can see North America was essentially at the equator or slightly below and it's rotated. So the modern day east coast is actually right, right here. So here's kind of proto Mexico and that kind of areas back in here. So this is essentially what the Earth looked like back during then during the Ordovician period. So I'm just going to add a little bit more here and then we'll move on a little bit here. You can change projection to something that's a little bit more common for global data sets. Like this one that I like to use is Malvida. Here you can see kind of the whole world using a Mulvida projection during the Ordovician period. So this was kind of the start of something that, you know, we wanted to make this easier to access so people didn't always have to build up, you know, this thing from scratch like this. But it's all based on the entity value domain and that particular property continental plates. And then you've got the individual years here. So what I was able to do is I was able to create a Wolfram function repository to make this a little bit easier. And not only that, we've got it hooked up to natural language so you can ask for it. So if you do troll equals and you say continental plates during the Carboniferous period, so we'll choose something other than we've been visiting the ornovation period a lot. Oops, didn't parse. Like, we might have been having some server side issues here. There we go. Well, that parses to the property anyway. So, so that's, that's a natural language way that you can actually get to the plates properties just by asking directly for the continental plates. And you can see it resolved here to that. I'll do a different query here and here you can see somebody's asking. I'm noticing Sander is asking, can we use timeline plot on this? I'll have to experiment with that. I don't know if timeline plot supports date this. I can try that here in a second. Actually, we'll give that a shot. I don't know that it'll handle the entity directly, but we can play with that. I have to admit I don't use timeline plot a lot. I think it's usual focuses for more modern dates and things like that. But you can probably set up a structure, you could feed the timeline plot and it should work. So here we can say map of the Carboniferous period. There we go. And we can see that it resolved to Wolfram function repository item and specifying the Carboniferous period. So if I evaluate that once again, you basically get back basically the same data that we saw before for the raw period. Remember when we asked for continental plates? Just paste that up here so we can remember. You can see it's basically the same thing. But the, the difference is that rather than seeing the raw polygons, the Wolfram function repository builds up the geographics for you so you don't have to remember how to reconstruct this entire structure here and do styles. So it's also got its own set of options, things like that. So let's see what else can we do here. So you can do things like continental. Let's see here. Oops, I missed the option here. So one thing we can do. You go to the whole from function repository. Let's just go there. Google search real quick. You can type in. Well, we've actually got a few. Let me do a more general search here. We'll come back to this later. So we can see other things that we've got here. But you can see we've got a number of things if you just do a search for geology. And the one thing we want to look at here is continental plates. So here you can see the default argument gives you the current continental plate arrangement. You can feed in an entity as we did over here. It also accepts entity classes. You can also specify dates as quantity. So if you wanted to say 300 million years ago, you can feed it in as a quantity or you can put it in as a data object, either one. So it's kind of convenient. There a number of examples that you see here. Scope and I want to look at the options. Continent style. There we go. Continent style goes to red. So there we go. So if you want to change the styles, it's really easy to look up the documentation for this thing and find out all the, all the options that you can tweak. It accepts most of the options for geographic. So in addition to that though it, it accepts a number of other options, including a way to style the individual continents. You can change the geo background to use a different color instead of the light blue that we're using here. You can turn on the geo grid lines or alter the default ones that are turned on, change the projection and specify whether you want the outlines to be shown or not. And that'll turn on essentially the edge form that we did here underneath the hood. So that's basically how this WFR was written. It was essentially a convenient way of constructing something like what we've seen here on the screen. So this was kind of the beginning of exploring the data that we already had in the entity value domain. Let's see here. I gotta see another question that just popped up here. I would like to see the continental plates animated through time. That can be done and in fact there's gonna be some documentation, exam examples coming up. I believe in 13.2, where we actually show how to do that. The, the problem is that because the data is hierarchical, so you have things like periods, epics, ages, the same data can be shared underneath different entities. Eons span a huge amount of time. And if you ask for the continental plates for a given eon, you're going to get all of them. So it's hard to just animate the data without kind of pre selecting the unique timestamped values that you want to show. And it can be done. It does require a little bit of work, but I don't know if I can dig that up during the thing. But it's definitely possible. And like I said, where I think we've got a time series example, we're planning on making it so that you can actually construct time series with these things. So it's interesting somebody else is also asking, can we see where to find the Morrison Formation? It's interesting that you asked that, because this just came up yesterday. For anybody that doesn't know, the Morrison Formation is one of the famous geological rock layers that's found. I believe it's in Montana. I think that's where it's at. I think that's. It could be in the Dakotas, but I think it's in Montana. But it's one of the famous places where they find dinosaur fossils. And one of the things we're planning to work on in the very near future is we're overhauling species data. And species data is going to get a lot bigger. It's going to be a lot more organized. And one of the things that we're planning to hook up, and this literally just started yesterday as we are planning to have a new entity type that covers geological formations. I would hope. I haven't looked at all the data yet, because it just came up yesterday that Morrison Formation would be one of them. And the idea is we could at least give you a rectangular boundary showing where outcrops of the Morrison Formation are found. But that data is very new, and we have to kind of dig through it and get it cleaned up before that's possible to be hooked up. Somebody's also asking if you can track the location of a point tied to the surface of the continental plate over time. Unfortunately, we cannot. The data source that we have gave us basically just snapshots of the world in time. And the individual plates, some of them come and go. I mean, you can have new plates that form, and others get subducted and disappear. And so over time, the same plates may exist or not exist, and we don't have any kind of an interpolating function or anything like that that says, okay, for a given point in time, where is this modern and long latitude and longitude thing located? So, for example, here in Champagne, we're at about 40.11 with minus 88.1 longitude. You would want to know where was that at during the Ordovician period or the Carboniferous period or the Cambrian period, whatever it would be. It would be very neat to be able to do that. And we would love to construct something like that, but unfortunately that would require a continuous way to generate these polygons. The data that we are using, I should mention, comes from a guy named Christopher Scotese who's one of the kind of famous guy that does a lot of the illustrations you see out there, the Internet for ancient world reconstructions for continents. And he has code that he maintains himself and kind of makes it a business to generate snapshots for anybody that wants them. But that's his code and kind of would destroy his business model. So I don't think he's willing to part with that. Unfortunately we would love to be able to do that kind of a thing, but unfortunately we don't have it. So anyway, so let's go back to exploring some more stuff here. So we were talking about the continental plate maps, Wolfram function repository item here. So that's kind of a good overview of what that can do. One of the other things that we wanted to do was construct a. Time chart that kind of allows you to get context. You may be familiar with certain names like Jurassic period, things like that, but you want to know where is that at with respect to sub periods and the eons and errors that contain them. So we have a resource, resource function. We're still not in the process of hooking natural language up to it. So it's not quite on production yet but so for now I'll do this by hand. So you can see there's autocomplete. So you can see geo geological period chronology chart. That's the one I'm going to go to next. And you can put in, let's see here, Jurassic period for example. And we're going to go down two levels. And here you get a time chart and you can see highlighted in red here is the Jurassic period. You can see a timescale here on the right hand side includes the parent division. So it's part of the Mesozoic era. It's followed by the Cretaceous period and preceded by the Triassic and it's broken up into the early, middle and late Jurassic epics. You can also try to go down an additional level. So if I go down three levels, the two refers to the, the level itself and how far down you want to go. But it also includes the parent. And here you can see it's broken up into a number of ages as well. So this allows you to kind of walk the time tree. So anyway, let's see here. Can we find a list of dinosaurs on a specific period? Somebody's asking that question. So yes, that is something that we can do. There is a property, if you look up here in the properties that we looked at, this is actually a property of the whole domain. But let's see here. Dinosaur families. So keep in mind that when you think of dinosaurs, most people think of Stegosaurus or Triceratops or something like that. These creatures only live during a very particular time in the geological history, only during the Mesozoic era. And as a result, you're only going to get data for those. Let's see, see, let's do a test of that real quick. Let's see here equals, let's see, let's go ahead and do Cretaceous. And we're going to ask for dinosaur families. And what you'll get back are a list of the families of dinosaurs that live during that time period. And then this, this dives into dinosaur data and allows you to kind of navigate through that. So you could then ask for the properties of the individual dinosaurs and things like that. Keep in mind that things like Tyrannosaurus, that's an entire genus. And, and you can see here that these are the families, these are not the individually the individual species. So Tyrannosaurus is a genus, Tyrannosaurus Rex is a species. There are other Tyrannosaurs as well. So we're hoping to have a lot more dinosaur information in the overhaul of species data. So more, more will be presented on that at a later date once we have that data, but it's not ready yet. Okay, so yes, we do have some temperature data. Let me do a quick query real quick, just so that you can see. So another thing that we should explore is not just the data that we have an entity value, but let's see here. Control T, command T. There we go. And I'm going to go to the Wolfram Alpha website. So if you go to Wolfram Alpha, you can kind of get a good overview of the data that we have for these things here. So let's try Triassic, type in Triassic, auto, completes Triassic period. There you can see the time range, you can see the Eon era, all the subdivisions, all that kind of stuff, kind of hierarchy key. And you can see all the individual property values that we have for these types of things, including the notable dinosaur families, biological events. You can see some of the maps that we've done here, kind of a almost geographics like thing. And down here, if you scroll down, you can see things like the sea level and how it was, how it changed the biodiversity, atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide. Some of this gets very controversial because there are different models that they follow when they're actually diving into this kind of data. And depending on the source they use to derive their information, you get different answers to that question. So things like carbon dioxide and oxygen are, you know, kind of tied to the globe, global climatology and things like that. People get very interested in that. But actually depending on the data that you look at, you get different answers. So and some periods have wider variants than others concerning how, how warm it was, how, how much carbon dioxide there was. So this is the data that we've got. But yes, there is data here. So no, we don't have anything about evolution data. And yes, we do have some, some images for dinosaurs, I believe. So. You type in Triceratops on alpha, you can see we at least have some images. These are basically Wikipedia style images. So you get little thumbnails, things like that. So anyway, so that's what we've got on dinosaurs. But we want to focus more on the geology rather than dinosaurs themselves. Like I said, dinosaurs only cover a very small percentage of the entire geological period. It's just the one that most people get introduced to that kind of gets them interested in fossils. But fossils span a much larger time frame anyway. So we've got the geological chronology chart. This allows you to kind of get a good overview of time, the individual time elements and how they relate to each other. So you can see the Mesozoic here. So we've got that. I should mention that if you're interested. A lot of times when I create some of these WFRs, I actually post a lot on the community website. So if you ever go to the Wolfram community website and search for geology, you can turn some of these things up. So this is another place you can go for more examples, things like this that are related to geology and just search for it and you'll find some of these things. And you can see essentially this is an entire community post on how we construct or how I constructed the chronology chart that you see here. It starts off with just navigating these things using trees. And if you go all the way down to the bottom, you can see how we kind of collapse it. So you lose the edges, different layouts of these trees. Here's, here's a version that's Getting closer to what we have, but it still has the giant edges from the tree structure. And then at the bottom we show how to take that and collapse down. So all you see essentially are the nodes. And so this is essentially what became, what ended up becoming the Wolfram Function repository item. So it shows how it was built up. So if you're interested in that, be sure to check out the community. The next thing I do want to explore, though, we've actually got another one. This is. This is much more recent and I find it much more interesting personally, is another resource function. This one does have natural language. You can say. Leaf map of Permian bedrock. Here you can see we get a Geographics expression that actually represents this data. So here you can see the data that we've got is basically North America and parts of Central America, and that includes the ocean beds surrounding it. We would love to have global data at high resolution for the entire world. I have not yet found such a data set. A lot of these surveys that finds the rocks and where they're located are done at a per kind of state level. And so somebody then has to go and go and accumulate all those and assemble them into one data set. And I've not yet found anybody that has done that. So, for example, I know data sets exist just for Great Britain or just for North America, things like that, but I have yet to find one that covers the entire world. So for now we're going with the data that we were able to easily find that had been cleaned up the most. And so it covers a good portion of North America and a little bit of Central American, tiny pieces of South America as well. So. But once again, just like we started off with the continental plate map that we have up here, I created a Wolfram function repository that has not yet the natural language. Notice it went to geographics that will be changing in the near future and it will actually go straight to a Wolfram function repository item. That makes the result a little bit cleaner, but we can actually manually. Oops. Capital R Resource function. You can see here we've got geological period, bedrock plot and. Permian. This is much shorter syntax than what we saw up above, but it's basically the same thing. It's under. Underneath the hood. That's what this Wolfram Function repository item is doing. It's just built up from Geographics, but we can also notice it's got, for convenience, it has some political boundaries that are drawn on top so you can see what's. What's where. So one of the things we can do is center typo. We can center on someplace like say, Oklahoma where we can see that red patch. And let's zoom in by specifying a different geo range, let's say, I don't know, 500 miles. So here we've zoomed into that area that we saw in the bigger map and we can kind of see where the Permian rock is found. So, so for, for those of you that may not know, when you're talking about bedrock, you're basically saying in a given area, strip away all the topsoil until you find that first top level of bedrock. How old is that rock in those various locations? And so you can see here that if you're looking for where is the Permian rock found, you can see it's, you can find it throughout the Rockies and some very spotty spots here throughout the mountains and then down into New Mexico. And a big swath though up from Texas through, through here. And so if you were really interested in finding fossils of say, Permian age life forms or something like that, or you just wanted to do the geology itself, you could actually go to these areas and look for rock outcrops and that's where you would find Permian age rocks. And this is just one simple example here. But I actually have a fairly recent community post that you can see here. Bedrock geology of north and Central America. And you can see here the kind of, the hero image for this entire plot kind of includes all of the data. It's all color coded. There's no legend in this particular image, but there is a legend further down if you want to turn that on. It's one of the features of this WFR that a legend can be generated. So you can see which color represents what the colors correspond to the standard colors defined by the Commission for the Geological Map of the World. And so they are standardized for use on maps. But you can see here we kind of do an exploration. Here's an example where I have plotted kind of, I'm just going to click on this so I can copy it. That's something that's nice about community. You can go to these inputs and just click on them and it'll copy the input automatically. Mnv. And here we're going to plot all of these, including plot legends goes to true. So we can actually get a legend here. Takes a second to download all the polygon data. And you get most of the Midwest here you can see that we've centered on Cincinnati. So right down in here, this is where Cincinnati, Ohio is. And you can see all the various rock ages color coded. So the Ordovician period, Siluria, Devonian, it even includes Illinois over here. So you can see Illinois has this light blue color over here, which corresponds mostly to this Pennsylvanian age. So we're into the carbon. So you find a lot of coal beds and stuff like the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian were laid down during a time of. Those are epics. They were laid down during the Carboniferous period because there were huge coal swamps, swamps that when those plants died, they got buried. There was lack of oxygen in the water, so they basically didn't decay. They turned into coal. And to this day, and you can see it also over here in, like, West Virginia, things like that, they did a lot of coal mining in these areas from all that Carboniferous swamp land that turned into coal. But here in Cincinnati, you actually see this kind of older rockets or division and age. And then just outside of that, you have Silurian, more, slightly more recent, and then brown. Just outside of that is Devonian. And as you go outwards from here, it gets younger and younger and younger. So you can build up such maps using this Wolfram Function Repository item fairly easily. And like I said, there's community posts over here, there, that make it a little bit easier and show how to do some of these things a little bit easier. So. Somebody's asking, how reliable is the data? Such as what happens if someone entered one of the dates wrong when typing it in? Do you mean. You mean the people that provided the data or do you mean users that use this functionality? I'm not sure what you mean by if somebody entered the date wrong. So these are. These come from basically the United States Geological Survey. So it's all been outsourced. It's about as most reliable as you can get. So you're probably not going to find data much better than this. But like I said, there could be global data that comes online at some point. It would have to be evaluated at the time we get it, but at least this data should be pretty reliable. And people say, you know, somebody's also asking, is this where you would drill for oil and do fracking? I assume that's what you're referring to. Is this kind of stuff in here? It depends. I actually, I'm not a professional geologist and I definitely don't know oil drilling. So I do know that there are certain geological structures, salt domes, things like that, that they can look for, that can often hint at the presence of possible oil, in which case they will do that But I don't want to say too much more on that because I don't actually know all the details of how they find good drilling sites. And I don't think, I mean, carboniferous stuff is mainly for coal. I don't doubt maybe some oil comes from there as well. I'm not sure that a lot of the oil, the oil reserves come from those places. It could be carboniferous and age. But like I said, I don't want to delve too much into that because I'm not an oil person. So I don't know. But definitely the coal. I know, I know that the reason for the coal is that I'm not so sure about the oil though. Anyway, let's see. So here, since. Since I'm here. Anyway, on this community post, you can see one of the sites in this Cincinnati, Ohio area. This is where I used to go fossil hunting down here in southeast Indiana. Right. Right before you get into Ohio, you can see the road cuts that you see here. Kind of a highly inclined road here with a really wide pull off a shoulder that you can park on and you're allowed to surface. Just bring a bag. Fossils are literally falling out of the ground. The age of these rocks in this particular area are Ordovician, So they're about 450 million years old. So that predates fish. You're not going to find fish fossils here. You're going to find things that look like seashells, so they're called brachiopods. You'll find echinoderms so rarely you'll find things like starfish, but not too often. You'll find sea lilies, which actually live today, at least a version of them do in very deep water. Corals, snail shells, even giant you had back then you had straight shelled nautiloids, basically big, big giant squid relatives with big, giant straight coned helmets on them. And you'll actually. I've actually found several fragments of those where you can see the individual cells inside there that preserved. And so it's a great place to go if you're looking a place to take your kids because it doesn't cost anything. If you're willing to drive to southeast Indiana or even on the Ohio or Kentucky side there. It's a great place to find fossils. Just don't bring a shovel because if the police drive through then they see you doing that, you will get in trouble. They don't want you destabilizing these rock cuts. Dinosaur fossils, I doubt that you're ever going to find anything like this there, because those are highly prized and I think most of those areas are protected, so keep that in mind. Here's some fossils that I have found in that area though. So you can see this is a brachiopod. This is kind of like a, call it a seashell. It's not quite. Here's another one here. You can see a trilobite that I found here. It's all curled up so its tail meets its face. You can see a couple little eye stalks here. This picture, I don't know how well it comes through on the zoom, but you can see there's, there's some divisions here. This is actually a portion of one of those filled in nautiloid shells. So you can see the individual chambers from its shell that was on its head. These are stems from some of those sea lilies. This is called a bryozoan. So it's kind of a microscopic organism that a colonial reef building type organism. If you look up close with this, you'll actually see tiny little holes where the animals lived. Horn corals, tentaculites. This is another creature from that time period. You can see here's a snail shell that I found. And These are all 450 million years old and literally were just found on the surface or required nothing more than just prying it out with a spoon. And once again, I kind of explore, you know, what did the world look like at that time. And it combines the use of things. We've already seen these time charts where the bedrocks found for various time periods. And so these are some of the tools that we've got. We're hoping to have more. Like I said, one of the things we just started looking at literally yesterday was possibility of adding a new entity type that covers the individual rock formations. So rather than what is the bedrock age, which is what this shows, you know, this shows where bedrock of that age can be found. In this case, it's the Archaean eon. So this is extremely old, 3 billion year old rock. You can find that up here in Canada. That's kind of the core of North America. The really stable part, the formations are the individual. Like if you're a fossil hunter and you actually go there and you're looking at the individual bedding planes, like what we. In this picture here, you know, this is actually called the. I believe it's the rich. There's various formations in the area. One of the, one of them is the Richmond formation. There's also the Whitewater, the Saluda and several others in this Area I don't remember off the top of my head, I think there's one called the Liberty Formation. And depending on which level you're at, you're in different formations. And so the older stuff is going to be at the bottom, newer stuff is up at the top. But it's all basically all around 450 million years throughout the entire area of Southeast and Ohio and Kentucky, that area there. So anyway, this is kind of a good overview of the material that we've got. You can branch out from this a little bit. I have another, it's a slightly older one about rifting and other geology related things. It does show the. It kind of shows how continents over time come together, then they rift and separate. It shows how you can kind of explore that. It shows how I was able to manually apply styles to individual plates. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as I would like. I had. I had to manually refer to parts like part 77 I knew was West Africa. And so it requires some investigation. But you can kind of use this as a guide for how, how I did that. It'd be nice if we had some way of annotating these and maybe eventually we'll do that. But the individual plates have different names through time. So Laurentia was one of the more stable blocks. It was pretty much called Laurentia throughout most of geologic history. But other things, like Africa at various times, especially China, was made up of individual blocks that eventually came together and became what we call China today. So it's hard to use modern names with some of these ancient things because they weren't always one piece back then. And so it becomes a little bit of an artwork to try to reconstruct and name these things, especially since they change over time. But once again, just go to the community website, you could search for geology and you'll find all these things, including. Here's an example where I've imported some data from the USGS United States Geological Survey about magnetic maps that were done through the Midwest. And you can see one of the things that it finds here is this giant ribbon that kind of goes all the way from Lake Superior down through Minnesota, all the way down through Iowa and into Nebraska and another one down here. And I talk a little bit about rifting that tried to happen 1.1 billion years ago that almost ripped North America apart, but failed. And you can see other failed rifts throughout here. So these are all related to geology and show different ways that you can explore geological type data within the Wolfram language. Some of them require you Import third party data. They're not necessarily provided with the product, but I provide links for where you can get that data and explore it yourself. So I encourage everybody to kind of take a look at these examples, show how it was done and play around with it yourself. I've even added some examples here using earthquake data showing where modern rifting has happened. And you can actually trace out some of the rifts just following earthquakes. So you can see here in Eastern Africa where you can see the rift valley, you can see this kind of line of earthquakes. And these are all along the rift valley where this part of Africa is rifting off will eventually be filled up with ocean water and Africa will split apart. You can kind of see it in a relief map where it's kind of splitting into this valley here as you come in from the Red Sea. So that's kind of a good overview of geology. I think I've covered just about all the elements that I can think of off the top of my head that are kind of worth presenting at this point. Like I said, we'll have formations coming as a new entity type sometime in the near future. We're still examining that data and cleaning it up to make sure that it's kind of coherent and assembled as best as possible. We're also interested in any other data sets, if anybody knows of some useful data sets that could help fill out this area a little bit more. Especially like I said, I would love to have a global data set for some of this. Like the data that we show here in North America. I would love to have global polygon type data for where do you find rocks of a given age, say in India or in Russia or in Germany. I would love to have that kind of data. I just haven't yet found a global data set that's reliable for doing that, that doesn't require manually piecing it together. So any feedback you guys can give us on that, that's great. You can either put it in on one of the community posts as a comment and I'll see it definitely then. Because since I wrote these community posts, that's a good way to get into contact with me is just to comment on one of those posts. I know we had some questions that came in earlier on. Does anybody have any additional questions? Actually, I do want to try something real quick. Somebody asked earlier. Let's see here. One that I haven't done. I don't remember if this works or not. Thought maybe I'd hooked this up, but I can't remember. Maybe I didn't no. Well, I think it's possible I'll have to play around with that myself. Somebody asked earlier about whether you could do timeline plots and I think you can, but I don't have a lot of experience with them myself. I don't use them because, like I said, timeline plots are usually used for modern historical calendar type dates. And I don't remember if it supports that far back or not. I think it does and I want to say maybe I played with it, but I didn't come with an example handy off the top of my head. And. One more thing here. Yes, actually did. I thought I remember doing something like this. So yes, you can actually just feed in one of these geological period entities right into the timeline plot. And it basically knows how to plot. It kind of shows from beginning to end where it goes there. So, yep, earthquake data just literally has earthquake. I'm sorry, it has data on earthquakes, both current and historical ones. It does not necessarily have data on faults. So you can see them by plotting all of the earthquakes over time. So let's see here, let's go back to here. And this is the Wolfram, you know, reference wolfram.com and you can search for earthquake data. And this kind of gives you a good overview of how to access the. And explore, explore the data. Let's see if they've already got some examples here. Well, here you can see somebody's already plotted all the earthquakes inside California and they even plotted the depth. So I think you can probably use the examples that are in the earthquake data documentation to kind of at least see where the fault is by looking for the earthquakes because that's honestly how they know where any fault is. They don't know about faults if they never see earthquakes on them. There could be, you know, here in the Midwest, for example, it's not as well known as it is out on the, on the west coast because they have so many earthquakes out there, they can use those for mapping. Here in the Midwest, earthquakes don't happen as much. And so they know certain sensitive areas. Like of course, people that are into geology have probably heard of the, the New Madrid seismic zone. So they've been able to map for the tiny earthquakes that happen, you know, near St. Louis and south, south of there you find the New Madrid area that's fairly active, although typically with very small earthquakes. But in 1811 there were huge earthquakes like probably 8.0 on the, on the Richter scale. But the problem is that because earthquakes are so less common in that area, they haven't mapped out all of the individual faults in that area. They only know some of them. So there could be faults underneath you that are ancient. And because they're no longer active today, we don't know about them because an earthquake has never happened on them. Earthquakes only happen for the most part at fault areas. So you can have an ancient 300 million year old fault that's buried underneath you. But if there's no active earthquakes going on, nobody would ever know that it's there because that's what they use to detect those things. So. All right, any other question? All right, Well, I want to thank everybody for attending and sitting through this. Hopefully it was fun and educational. It's kind of a recreational hobby topic for me, but I'm glad I was able to work on it. I'm hoping to continue to work on some of this kind of data. I think it makes for some really interesting maps. I want to remind everybody that we have these every these talks every Wednesday on different topics in the Wolfram language as well as Wolfram Alpha. So feel free to check the community post concerning this to get a schedule for what talks are going to be coming up. Next one should be next Wednesday. I don't off the top of my head know what the next one is, but the schedule is posted on the community website, so I encourage everybody to check that out. All right, that'll be it. And I thank you all for attending.