ABSTRACT

This grant supports a partnership between geochronologists who have built and run laboratory facilities that are designed to measure the ages of rocks using radioisotopic and astronomical methods, geoscientists who are building synthetic databases that depend critically on accurate and precise ages of rocks in order to test hypotheses in the Earth and life sciences, and computer scientists who are building infrastructure components that are now being used broadly in education and research. The aim is to address a 'grand challenge' in the Earth sciences: to develop a fully integrated four-dimensional digital Earth so that we may fully understand dynamic Earth system evolution through time. To meet this goal the team is developing: (1) a robust cyberinfrastructure to manage and expose data produced by multiple distributed geochronology laboratory facilities around the USA, (2) a digital mechanism to enable scientists of all types to readily discover and use geochronologic data, while at the same time keeping age estimates closely connected to geochronology lab expertise and underlying, laboratory-specific data, (3) protocols and workflows that pass geochronological data and metadata from labs to synthetic geological and paleobiological databases and data repositories, and (4) software that can harness this new geochronological infrastructure and leverage it in order to generate age models for broad swaths of rocks and thereby enable the correlation of Earth system records across a range of nested spatial and temporal scales. Institutions formally collaborating in these efforts include: University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Arizona, Boise State University, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, and University of Minnesota.

Geochronological data are central to our understanding of Earth's past and future. This collaboration between geo- and computer scientists is: (1) creating cyberinfrastructure that better leverages existing and new laboratory-generated geochronologic data, and (2) integrating this infrastructure with with synthetic databases including: Paleo Biology Data Base (https://paleobiodb.org), Neotoma Data Base (http://www.neotomadb.org), Macrostrat (https://macrostrat.org), as well as the Integrated Earth Data Alliance (IEDA) Geochron (http://www.geochron.org/) data repository using a standard that can be widely applied by others. The team's approach is unique in that it involves the parallel efforts of both the producers and consumers of geochronologic data as well as technical staff who have a working knowledge of geologic and biologic databases. The team is also well positioned to broadly serve geochronology because it engages three different geochemical/radioisotopic systems that address different geological problems and time scales. One of the overarching science goals of EarthCube is to characterize the key processes, interactions and feedbacks operating at and across different temporal and spatial scales and biological, chemical, mechanical, and physical domains. These modest, but concrete, steps allow the development of templates for distributed, laboratory cyberinfrastructure and geochronologically grounded models that can be adapted and used across Earth science communities. The aim is to share best practices and move Earth scientists towards an open, frictionless transfer of data and knowledge. The impacts of this project extend beyond the participating laboratories and collaborations and include: (1) three young geoscientists (1 PhD student and 2 Postdoctoral scholars) are gaining the cyberinformatics experience to become next generation faculty/research leaders, (2) a set of standards for distributed laboratory server operations is being created and implemented, forming the foundation for establishing a global network of lab-derived geochronological data, and (3) the GeochronAPI deployed across this network is providing a mechanism by which to integrate and synthesize geochronological data into independently developed applications, including geodiscovery-oriented Flyover Country (http://fc.umn.edu). Through workshops the team is engaging a wide spectrum of geochronologists to converge on an open standard for the GeochronAPI system, and their work with the synthetic databases highlighted above engages a large community spanning bio- and geoscience. All of the project's software, both lab-centric and external facing, is being made accessible in public GitHub repositories to encourage open, creative development.

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