I just happened to stumble upon an update of a tool to Create Geologic Cross Sections, eXacto Section v. 2.0, that I mentioned in July. Jennifer Carrell at the Illinois Geological Survey wrote this tool. The latest update is from December 8, 2010 and can be downloaded at ESRI’s ArcGIS Resource Center. Our office has used previous versions and finds in very useful in creating cross-sections. I have not tried this latest update.

I was looking for links to all the State Geological Surveys and found the Association of American State Geologists (AASG) Homepage to have exactly what I needed. I hope to build some sort of inventory of data samples available. If I do one a day, I can be done in 10 weeks, or about 3 months. What I will find the most useful is data distribution methods and data structures.

In the last couple months, I’ve had a bit of an eye-opening about Geography. People actually trained in geography may implicitly understand this but I, with my Accounting degree, have spent the last 16 years ‘doing’ GIS without realizing the foundation of geography–geology. I picked up enough geography to understand some of the inter-relationships between people and the lands they live on. But what I didn’t pick up on was how the lands we live on are formed.