Drone photography Friday 3 - Andes Geology from the air

Time to go into the laboratory - the chasm!

Drones are powerful. Annoying if you are trying to enjoy nature and they are buzzing by your head but if you are trying to see places that are difficult to get to or to observe places impossible to get to, they are the way to go. Photos are also powerful, they each tell a thousand words.

Note the vehicle and road for scale.

Combining photography and drones we can "visit" and document areas that pre-drones were only possible with helicopters, full sized machines that consume a lot of fuel and are thus expensive, or through painful bush-bashing.

Drones thus provide a fairly cheap way to do fieldwork, observe, and obtain data to better understand an area. I say fairly cheap because good drones still are expensive and well if you crash it and you cannot get to it, your investment is lost (and perhaps more importantly your data).

Note the chasm that heads away from the water. We are going to explore above here and inside, the easy way, with a quick flight up in the drone...

Note what we see here. There is a vertical step, or a cliff that is fairly straight with the side on the right higher than the side on the left. One way we see that is that there is rock on the right and trees on the left, the trees go right down towards the base of the cliff.

What are we actually seeing here?

Differences yes, changes in elevation, variability in vegetation in surfaces, in roughness of the land.

Here is another perspective of the area. Again note the variability and changes in vegetation, trees on one side etc. The cliff, etc.

Now time to fly into the chasm. What can we see here? Harder to tell just where we are and how large things are in this photo but the trees again help. We can get a sense of how tall things are and wide they are from using the trees as a reference point. Currently we cannot drop something on the ground into our field of view with our drones for "scale". Maybe someday, but for now everything is relative.

Here is the same photo as above with a white line to draw attention to the plane, likely a fault plane that can be seen as well in the photo above. Is this structure part of the reason this chasm is here? Perhaps... When you look at the above photo without the white line, can you see the plane I am referring to?

It would be nice to have a person here to see just how big things are but the trees help and we can estimate how tall they are from the photos and from observations on the ground (using our eyes). The straighter planes we can see, or lines in the rock can provide insight as to why this chasm is here (i.e. why did it form), why is it still here, are there lithological controls (e.g. changes in rock type), or something else happening here?

Hope you enjoy these drone photos from a beautiful raw place up in the Andes. There are many things we can observe from photos (rock type, structures, vegetation cover, geomorphology) and drones are an awesome way to do it. Fieldwork is all about observations, what can we see and we did we see. By sharing photos we can show others what we saw and share the experience.

Finally - looking towards unexplored land. Another day perhaps...

These photos were taken by me at 25 m to 300 m above the surface by drone.

You can see my last post on Antarctica here:
https://steemit.com/photography/@snowyknight/fieldwork-geology-photos-from-antarctica-1

#photography #nature #dronephotography #beauty #geology #andes #travel

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Original photos - text.

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