EDINBURGH - Come April a small team of experts from the Glasgow School of Art and the government heritage entity Historic Scotland will fly to South Dakota at the behest of an organization called CyArk and the United States National Park Service. They will make laser scans and computer models of Mount Rushmore.

The Scottish team of four or five will spend a few days setting up and moving around their scanners to capture all of Mount Rushmore’s nooks and crannies, collecting billions of bits of digital information . What results should be the most complete and precise three-dimensional models ever of the site .

The Scottish team has achieved some unprecedented levels of sophistication with their models. Through scanning, the experts can conjure up what objects looked like ages ago, in effect turning the clock back on ancient sites. They can simulate the effects of climate change, urban encroachment or other natural or man-made disasters on those same sites .

Douglas Pritchard, a Canadian-born architect by training, is the wizard behind the Digital Design Studio at the art school. He heads the Scottish laser expedition with David Mitchell, director of Historic Scotland’s Technical Conservation Group.

A box, with a laser inside, sits on a tripod; as the box slowly rotates 360 degrees, the laser, moving up and down, bounces its beam off whatever is solid in front of it. It registers some 50,000 points in space every second. Traditional surveyors might produce a couple of hundred measurements a day . Lasers collect millions of measurements per hour.

This spring, at a conference in Glasgow, the country’s culture minister, Michael Russell, met with Ben Kacyra, the American engineer and inventor of the scanner. Mr. Kacyra had established the nonprofit CyArk to compile scans of 500 Unesco World Heritage sites around the globe. The Scottish crew was signed up to scan for CyArk five Scottish World Heritage sites as well as five other sites.

Mr. Pritchard showed off on his laptop a ruined Victorian monument, Paisley Fountain. It was returned in virtual guise to its original lacquered green sheen . When combined with the laser scans, the scrapings proved what the surface of the fountain first looked like. Nobody had imagined it to have been so shiny.

“But,” as Mr. Pritchard said, “technology doesn’t lie.”



Laser scanning can accurately conjure up what objects looked like ages ago. A section of Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland. / HISTORIC SCOTLAND