In the beginning... Visible Geology was started by Rowan Cockett in a undergraduate engineering geology class at the University of Calgary, Canada. There were many class activities that involved visualizations, for example, failure wedges, road cuts, and volume calculations. Rowan wrote a few simple implementations in MATLAB, and then got a little bit carried away.

First Iterations After creating some mockup MATLAB visualizations for creating outcrop patterns of geologic beds, Rowan approached the introductory geology instructor, and developed some tailored software for the course. Unfortunately, MATLAB didn't provide a fast and easy way to distribute software to non-MATLAB users: time to put it on the web!

The Web The web is changing, and there are all sorts of cool experiments pushing the boundaries and fundamental ideas of what a browser is. No longer is the web just for reading text files. Games and videos (and cool educational software!) are making this environment an interactive and immersive experience. Why not bring some geology to this new environment?!