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EarthCac
America®logical Society of
he
The Geo
Gullfoss, an amazing EarthCache site in Iceland.
EarthCaching–How You Can Get Involved
GSA TODAY | MAY 2016 Matt Dawson, Program Officer, GSA Education & Outreach many hundreds of individual cachers, there are now well over
20,500 EarthCache sites in more than 167 countries. These sites
Engaging the public in geoscience can be a challenge. What is have been visited by more than 6.3 million people, and the
even more of a challenge is having them experience geology in number is rising exponentially.
the field with nothing more than a few pages of notes. Yet
EarthCaching has them doing exactly that at more than 20,500 EarthCaches can be developed by anyone in the community
sites around the globe. through the geocaching website www.geocaching.com
using a set of guidelines found at community.geosociety.org/
We want to add more sites and we can do that best with earthchache/home. The ideal sites are ones that laypeople can
your help. visit to learn about some interesting geological phenomenon not
only by observing it but also by undertaking a task that gets them
EarthCache™, a program developed and coordinated by The more involved in the science. For example, people might be taken
Geological Society of America (GSA), is part of the highly to a road cut that shows a dramatic normal fault. The geocacher
successful worldwide treasure-hunt phenomenon known as could be asked to work out the fault displacement by observing a
geocaching. The game is based around the use of a GPS receiver distinctive layer that is offset. Another example might be to ask a
to find a location where other people have hidden a container. visitor at a fossil location to measure the size of the fossils and
Participants will find a log book and many small treasures inside work out an average size.
the container—they sign the log book, trade trinkets, then put
the container back in the same place. Afterward, they log the How can you help?
experience online. We are looking for GSA members who would like to get
In EarthCaching, however, there is no container—Earth itself involved by developing EarthCache sites for the general public
provides the treasure. Visitors to EarthCaches are asked to and in other EarthCache-related projects. To get started, just
undertake an educational geology–based task to both expand complete the simple online form at http://bit.ly/1PnwSxl
their own knowledge and to prove that they visited the site. They and we’ll email our booklet “EarthCaching—A Guide for
then log their visit on the geocaching website. GSA Members” to you. It outlines how to help us make this
program grow.
EarthCaching started in 2003 when a GSA member mentioned
during the annual meeting that GSA should somehow get GSA will host the 5th International EarthCache Event (5IEE)
involved in geocaching. Within a few months, GSA partnered on Saturday, 24 Sept. 2016, at the Colorado Convention Center in
with the geocaching company Groundspeak, Inc., and the Denver, Colorado, USA. This event is just before the GSA Annual
National Park Service established a set of guidelines for the Meeting, so we invite you to come and learn even more about
creation of EarthCaches, setting up three trial sites. From these EarthCache.
three, one in Australia and two in Colorado, and with the help of
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