Note that the map features and topographic features (roads and rivers, in grey and pale blue respectively) are projected onto a datum plane at sea level; the true ground level varies between 0 and 50 m elevation over most of the Stellarton Basin.
Animations and images on this page are copyright © John Waldron 1998-2008. (For non-commercial, educational use of this material, contact john.waldron@ualberta.ca)
Note: this animation file is approximately 40 Mb in size and may take a considerable time to display, depending on the speed of your connection.
About the animation
The file is a Quicktime movie based on views of the structure of the Foord coal seam in the Stellarton Basin. Initial data sources were mainly subsurface plans of historic coal mines, to which were added data from outcrops and from exploration boreholes. These were compiled using ArcGIS and viewed in ArcScene, which was used to generate the movie. The file should be viewable in most browsers with a Quicktime plugin, or in the Quicktime application or Windows Media Player.
The duration of the animation is 100 s (1 minute 20 seconds). The animation should start as the file is downloaded. However, you may wish control the speed of the animation for yourself. To do this, click on the controls at the bottom. Alternatively, click once on the movie to make it the 'focus' on your browser; then, you should be able to control the movie using either the arrow keys on your keyboard or the wheel on your mouse if you have one.
Initially, the animation shows a map of the Stellarton basin, coloured according to the following legend.
Note that the map features and topographic features (roads and rivers, in grey and pale blue respectively) are projected onto a datum plane at sea level; the true ground level varies between 0 and 50 m elevation over most of the Stellarton Basin.
At 8 seconds the coloured fills of the geological units are removed, revealing a triangular irregular network representing the contoured portion of the Foord coal seam, shown in blue, with darker colours showing increasing depth, and shaded with illumination from the north (top).
The animation then zooms in on the Foord seam and the viewpoint rotates to show an oblique view of the 3-dimensional structure.
At 25 seconds, boreholes are added, shown in green.
The viewpoint then rotates to a position looking obliquely into the Albion syncline from the east, and zooms in on the area of historic mining. Some flickering of colours is evident on the triangular irregular network, as a result of the video compression used by ArcScene in the creation of the animation file.
At 65 s a scan of a historic mine plan is added, draped on the triangular irregular network. The viewpoint then rotates to a position north of the basin, and then descends through the sea-level datum. The final view is looking up, from several km deep in the subsurface, at the underside of the mined portion of the coal seam, represented by the scanned mine plan.