Toward a goal of a "super" three-dimensional geological map

Portraying geological information in three-dimensions (3D) has been a practice of geologists since the early 1900s. The conventional and most widely used method of 3D portrayal, in both modern times and before computers were available, has been through the use of cross sections. Cross sections are the basic tool for presenting the geologist’s interpretation of the data between known points, and a cursory sense of geologic structure and the continuity of geologic units. However, they provide information for only a single plane through the Earth, and they do not provide the geologist, nor end-users, with a clear sense of the three-dimensionality of the geology. Multiple cross sections and fence diagrams improve the portrayal, yet still leave significant voids in information that the user must infer, most commonly by abstractly “filling in the blanks”.