If you've spent any time in local coffee shops or boutiques, you know that naming your business after "The Driftless" carries a certain amount of outdoorsy eco-prestige. 

But, according to UW-Madison geologist Dr. Eric Carson, if that business is across the river in Minnesota or Iowa — they are living a lie.

For the past 18 years, Dr. Carson has been mapping The Driftless. He joins ahead of his Badger Talk at 5:30 p.m. Thursday at the Sparta Free Library to tell us just exactly what that means and why it's taken two decades. 

Carson talks about going county-by-county — a job we assume involves a leather notebook, a magnifying glass, and a horse with no name.

Carson humors us on the tech front (turns out they use airplanes with lasers called LiDAR and drill 100-foot soil cores instead), but he breaks down the mind-blowing reality of our backyard — why the ice sheets missed us, why Lake Superior is actually a giant billion-year-old tear in the earth, and how a local river used to flow east, toward Canada, instead of west into the Mississippi River.

Plus, we look at why the U.S. is facing a massive shortage of rock-nerds and why geology is actually a high-security, high-demand career.

Check out the preview, and bring your questions for Carson Thursday at the Sparta Library.

Any school, group or organization that would like to host a Badger Talk, either in person or online, email here or request a speaker online at badgertalks.wisc.edu.