Determining the ages of ancient materials like rock, coral, and shells is an important part of how geoscientists study the earth, providing information on a wide variety of processes, such as how fast sea level rises and falls over ice-age cycles and how frequently volcanoes erupt. One common method for determining how the age of natural materials is called U-series dating, which involves natural radioactivity in rocks of Th and U isotopes; the method is commonly applied to materials that are the 1000 to 500,000 years old.  The collection and interpretation of U-series data in such studies has in the past been impacted by a variety of factors, such as how the data are processed, the  estimation and propagation of uncertainty, and  the radioactive decay calculations, all of which are handled differently in lab groups around the world, which in turn contributes to a scatter and variability in interpretations made from data sets collected in different labs.

This primary goal of this DIBBs Pilot Demonstration project was to develop software to modernize the management and interpretation of U-series data, and develop a community of practice around its use. Our goal has been to make the calculation, archiving, community access, and interpretation of U-series geochronology data in the earth and ocean sciences as rigorous, seamless, and simple as possible, and to make the data resulting from such studies findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable ("FAIR").

This DIBBs award was conducted as a collaborative effort that extended existing software called "ET_Redux" to allow it to work with U-series data (it was originally developed to work with other isotope systems). The newly-extended "ET_Redux" software package resulting from this DIBBs award now provides tools to calculate, visualize, and interpret U-series dates from user-input and legacy data, and tools to ingest new and existing data into an established geochronology archive, Geochron.org, that previously did not include U-series data.  This database environment will allow the public and other scientists to freely find and access  U-series geochronology results that it houses, making the data of prior and future projects easier to find and reuse.

The project demonstrated the successful collaboration between software engineers and earth scientists by exposing, refining, and encoding the U-series geochronology analysis workflow, mathematics, and dataflow occurring after initial data acquisition and reduction. We hope that the resulting software will become a "gold-standard" that provides a seamless transition from analysis, to publication, to archiving which, when combined with other dating schemes supported by Geochron.org, will enhance the quality and breadth of results arising from queries into the database by researchers. These capabilities are needed to exploit both legacy data and the large volume of new U-series data presently being acquired.  Perhaps in the future the effort will be further expanded to encode the full data collection workflow from mass spectrometer to archived results, to even more completely record and make discoverable the process of U-series geochronology.

In addition to the software, this project orchestrated the publishing of an important paper on reporting standards: "Data reporting standards for publication of U-series data for geochronology and timescale assessment in the earth sciences", at:  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1871101416301479

The software, "ET_Redux", is available at the open-source repository: https://github.com/CIRDLES/ET_Redux

Last Modified: 12/01/2019
Modified by: James F Bowring