Remote sensing roughly means extending human sensory perception to distances greater than we can achieve unaided and to information that is far beyond our physiological capabilities.
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| Image Interpretation in Geology |
Vision is far and away our most powerful and flexible sense, and so the strict focus is on capturing information about the Earth's properties in the nearly continuous, two-dimensional fashion that is characteristic of images. This is possible only for those properties that control how Earth materials interact with electromagnetic radiation-not only visible light, but a spectrum that extends from gamma- to microwave radiation. Other attributes relenting to natural variations in density, magnetic and electrical properties are detectable, but only in a discontinuous fashion-from point to point or along surveyed lines. The same holds for variations in chemistry, topographic elevation and the geometric structure of rocks, both at and beneath the surface, plus a host of other kinds of geological information. Although some of these attributes can be measured from a distance, the immediate results are not images.They are not excluded from the book, however, because there are means of recasting numbers distributed irregularly in two cartographic dimensions into the form of images. Visual perception is unsurpassed in extracting nuances from any kind of image, whatever its means
of derivation. So, there is an overlap between remote sensing and more familiar means of gathering geo-scientific information. Part of it is through images, and part through data analysis itself. One of the most important new tools is using computers to find patterns and correlations among far more layers of information than the human intellect can grasp. We deal as a matter of routine with spatial and to a lesser extent time dimensions, but a geological problem often involves tens of different dimensions.
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