How to Import LiDAR Data into Google Earth

hello everybody and welcome back to the channel today we have an informative episode for you hikers and prospectors today we will be talking about lidar and how it can help identify points of interest in a particular area before i get started i want to shout out to the prospecting geologist for teaching everybody how to do this he has many informative lidar videos on his channel he even offers a service of making lidar maps for an excellent price and provides a gpa lidar bundle so after you watch this video head over to the prospecting geologist channel link in the description below hello everybody now that i've got my computer all booted up i wanted to show you how to get lidar data onto your google earth map now for most of you that are interested you're all going to be gold prospectors or some sort of a prospector now so what we're going to do is we're going to find an area that that we're going to prospect and so if you're a gpa member you're you can go to these spots now there's an area right outside of boise got 40 acres and they give you the coordinates here the ingress and the center of the claim so to find it on google earth what i like to do is i just click i just copy it go to copy and then you go into the search bar delete anything that's in there now you right click and click paste now the next thing you want to do is you want to erase the word buy so delete the buy b y so anyways i'm deleting it hitting enter and it's going to zoom right in to that spot the ingress point and the lidar data is going to be way bigger than this so um so what i want to do is i want to find this spot on the usgs map and we're going to type in um to your search bar we're gonna type in um what is it national map viewer download okay so this is the link you want to click right there now what happens is uh you've got all this data on the left side and it's all unchecked and you got this map on the right side so now what you what the data we're actually looking for is called elevation products 3dep now there's this other one called elevation source data lidar which is kind of confusing but you don't want to use that you want to click this box and you'll get all this information so uncheck these and what i want to go over real quick this is the confusing part it took me forever to figure out what uh going on here so you see how this picture has really fine resolution and this is more grainy and fuzzy well um that's what it's trying to show you here is that one arc second one meter one third arc second one i one ninth arc second two arc seconds so one meter is the highest resolution that the um map has now the reason there's all these different choices is there's only data for some of the for some areas for some of this stuff so um if you're just getting started i think the best thing to do would be to find the most resolution which is one meter and click the show button now you see how all this red just showed up right here now we're going to be right here in idaho so we're actually going to use one meter but you could tell that there's not that much one meter resolution here um let me let it catch up if you're in california there's a little right here in the sierras and then new mexico has got some uh looks like it's still trying to catch up with the screen here there we go new mexico has got a lot so colorado's got really good resolution arizona's got a little bit around tucson um right here in the uh the upper parts here of arizona they've got some um but uh most y'all are gonna have to go with um like one-third you see how the whole united states is covered basically and that's probably the best you're gonna get so but since we've got um higher resolution we're gonna go back to one meter and hide that show one meter and i'm gonna click this check box now what that check box is going to do is it's actually going to be um searching for this so the first the next step is to find my area where i'm going to be doing my prospecting here so along morris creek i'm going to take a left on grimes creek and then it's right in here is where where we're going to be doing looking for the map so i'm going to click the extense button and i'm going to pick that spot right there now i would like the data for that now you click search products now it says that we've got one one square that's a one it's an arc second so basically uh this square is that big now if i were to have chosen area bigger than that i would have to download more than one square and then stitch them together in the next step but since i want to do this so it's super simple for you guys we're going to do just the one data so then you click download link tiff and i just did that right before this so i'm going to click it and then it's actually right here that's it's just downloaded so now that you got the data downloaded it takes a couple minutes you're going to want to hop over to saga gis now saga gis is the program that i use to um stitch together the little maps and make maps it's actually a super powerful program and it's free now right now um i'm going to be using i'm using to www.sagasaga.org gis.org it's super easy to find if you google it and then you go to this button called download go to the download page now i'm using saga 7 so if you want to follow along download this one right here install it on your computer and then we'll jump back into the next step if you're going to want in the latest and greatest go ahead with this i'm sure the buttons are pretty close to the same i don't know exactly what the difference is but here we go so download that and then open up saga so it looks just like this now you go to file open now go to downloads click open on the file you just downloaded now you see this little colorful chart here in the corner that's the data so now you want to click on it go to geoprocessing go to visualization go to grid go to terrain map view okay then when it's asking you is which data do you want me to use and i'm going to since we've only got the one data the one data set you're going to click this one data set if you had multiple data sets you would want to use you would want to choose from which one you wanted so since we've got just the one we're going to click on it dem click on that and then shade click create so it's going to look like that contours click create and leave all this stuff alone topographic lines blah blah okay so you got the information you need click ok now it's going to run this uh algorithm and it's going to make this a super cool looking map now you can zoom into it you can see all these old rows or these roads where the houses are but it gets even cooler the next thing we want to do is export it to google earth so you click you zoom out so you see the whole thing now you click map export map to google earth now you want to save it as a file now i've got a bunch of different spots here i'm going to call this his and his okay because that's the name of the claim now the cell size right here it's default to 10. now if you go down to one it might be too too much information for your computer so try like 1.5 and then you click this load button make sure that's clicked click ok and then it's going to save it and then automatically open it up in google earth and with the magic of video editing it should be ready right now it loaded the map into google earth and it laid it right on top and you can go over here and you can see in your temporary places that that data is right here so you can uncheck it and you can check it so let's take a look now here's the lidar data now you can see all kinds of different stuff in here that you weren't able to see before there's an old road right here looks like there's some mining activity that happened right here on this side right here you can see some mining activity you can see some more mining activity right here right here so let's look at the difference here so here's the road now let's turn this off see if we can see the road nope you can't see the road you can kind of see the road maybe if you know it's there another thing that we could look at is this road looks like he used to go across the river and then over to this side wonder what they were doing looks like there's another little road that goes right here and look at this there was a road that's actually on the other side of the river it would come over crossed over the river and kept going now if i know i know that if you all have been down on this road here or on this site here you can actually see there's this huge lump right here and that's actually that's all the material that came out of out of this it's basically like an alluvial fan and all this material is coming out draining down and and going into the river here but when they were making this road they just cut right through that and they just you know that's that's just what they did back then with the bulldozer so they can get across and then ever since that looks like they have then now there's the regular road that's there that's paved that you can get on but um but if you're going to be metal detecting you know it would be nice to check out this road right here because you never know i've actually been there and i have metal detected it and i found some pretty cool stuff uh looks like there was a pond right here or some sort of a settling pond or something um let's see what else we can see see these old roads it's pretty neat huh you can see what people have been where people have been going look here's an old road right here you know who knows where this stuff will lead now this isn't like the most interesting location but it is the most accessible location for you all to try out and um you know looking see here the difference road or no road road see all this information you're gonna we can get right here from this you could see all kinds of activity on this hillside human activity really stands out when you have lidar um you can see where people have dug you can see old roads you can see old sample holes all kinds of good stuff now um i want to give you guys some bonus content here now that we've all covered the lidar i want to go over a little bit of the geology in this area and i'm going to turn on some other stuff so let's turn on um the idaho mines the mines that are in idaho so we're just going to look for uh boise county where did she go boise county i'm going to turn them on turn all the mines on and all the historical data so you could see all these mines that are up here on grimes creek right here is a huge tailings i guess dredge tailings pile you can see from the satellite if we did the lidar right here you could see them all these tailings um i think they were done by j.r simplot and all those guys back in the 70s and before that even the the um the 1800s so they were using old bucket line dredges and um let's check out over here i've got some more lidar data actually we could look at it's a much bigger section of lidar okay now this is where it gets kind of cool using your lidar you can get in here and you can see all these dredge workings but you'd never know that they worked alongside these hills here they were washing rocks stacking them i think they actually brought in uh this is like hydro washing maybe or or the old chinese uh they did this you see how just like cracked and dry this land looks after looking at this map you could see that they worked these hills now if you had a metal detector this would be an awesome place to metal detect this is private property it got bought by those that big company in texas that bought like half of idaho this used to be um owned by the guy who owned the dredging company he uh applied for the patented land and they approved it and then he they sold it to that company texas so you could see these mines here the twin sister mine you can actually look this information up on the usgs data but look at how extensively work this area is i mean this is just all this is they just washed these rocks stacked them hydro mined it just blasted all the water ran it all off down the hill and you could see it's just gnarly what they did um let's go back to where we were looking earlier though uh so here let's go look at idaho city so you can see they worked worked a hill really good over here tons of mines idaho city like they worked the hill really well here going up elk creek they worked worked it all worked here they've chopped off the top of this mountain right there just crazy amount of work that they did up here look at all these roads it's all dredge tailings you can see all this work but they work here there's tons of history on all this too so that's cool to look at um another thing now that we got the mines on there i also have um the idaho uh geol geo geologic units of idaho which is kind of cool because it shows um it shows the different rocks um the bedrock and stuff now these are all faults right here isn't it kind of interesting that these mines follow those faults they just follow them very nicely boom boom boom so these faults may or may not be the source of gold but it looks like some of them really are now let's look back at the uh the grimes creek one so here's our little here's our little spot here that we're gonna we're gonna hopefully be mining here in the next couple days maybe i'll do a video out here but here's where kevin holgrin found that that nugget he found it right over here on this hill and [Music] um we got to talking on the phone the other day and uh i suggested that you know maybe that nugget actually came out of this you know alluvial fan and not you know coming from down the river here and and he he tended to he actually agreed that you know it got unearthed by this bulldozer and you know it makes sense that there's this fault that goes right through here and anything that came out of here could have contained gold because if we zoom out it looks like there's a lot of mines um that were actually worked and actually looked this fault up and there there were gold producing mines off of this fault now it goes on both sides it's kind of cool that you can see where all that good stuff is coming from and i actually hiked back up here one day and i got oh i don't know about right here is where it sticks out you can actually see it's a purple purple deep purple vein of quartz and it's really cool to see it's it's not very it's not very wide but it's a it's a very cool um uh fault here with with all kinds of mineralization coming out of it now if you try to metal detect over here good luck it's got so many uh 22 shells it's not even worth it anymore so anyways that's all i've got today guys i hope you enjoyed this content if you found it useful i would appreciate if you subscribe to my channel like and share and we'll catch you on the next one so talk to you later guys bye

Channel: Mining Magnets

Views: 37,602

Keywords: Lidar, google Earth, Prospectig, Gold, Hiking

Id: E4SPzxn2vQQ

Length: 20min 32sec (1232 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 27 2021