Simple cylindrical interpolation over a relatively small data set to determine the position of cave walls for 2D and 3D digital cave cartography

Abstract

Cartography is a key step in cave exploration. As models of caves, maps help determine locations to be used for organism capture traps by Biologists, sample collection sites for Chemists, Physicists, Geologists and Speleologists in general. Today, available software utilizes numerical and hand drawn data to create two-dimensional and three-dimensional digital cave maps. These applications require the cartographer to interact heavily with the software in the decision making process particularly when it comes to determining the position of the cave walls which is crucial to cave cartography since the outline they form is in essence the two-dimensional map and also serves as a base for all surface plots and maps. We present a novel approach for determining the position of cave walls by performing simple cylindrical interpolation on individual sections of the cave to extract the desired cave walls coordinates. We have incorporated this approach to caveGEOmap, a free standalone application that treats survey measurements as data points from a two variable piecewise- function. These data points are interpolated using the data itself to estimate some of the necessary variables producing the desired cave maps. The process is completed using only the entry of the data and interpolation scales as an input for the creation of the maps. This allows the cartographer to use caveGEOmap effortlessly to produce various two and three- dimensional digital cave maps and calculate maximum cave height and approximate volume. We include the upper passage of Water- Cave as a case study to present both the internal processes and possible two-dimensional and three-dimensional digital maps

Keywords

• nterpolation
• cylindrical coordinates
• cave
• wall
• map
• cartography
• speleology
• digital
• cavegeomap