We tested out using drone-based photography this field season for the Chile Slope Systems project. There’s a lot of potential with this technology for the high-resolution stratigraphy work we do. Simple, but fundamental, visualization is the most obvious value. Getting a view of impossible-to-get-to outcrop faces is a game-changer.

Here’s a ‘fly by’ video taken of the Rio Zamora outcrops that Ph.D. candidate Neal Auchter is working on. The 2-minute video starts lower in the section highlighting the outcrops in the river canyon and then the drone turns up a side creek to show the overlying strata.