June 3 – 4, 2004

To be held at
Joint Oceanographic Institutions JOI
1201 New York Ave, NW, Suite 400
Washington, DC 20005

supported by the National Science Foundation

Organizers:
Kerstin Lehnert, Steve Goldstein
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University
Palisades, NY 10964
lehnert@ldeo.columbia.edu
steveg@ldeo.columbia.edu

Linking Information Systems in Marine and Terrestrial Geosciences:
Sediment Geochemistry

1. Rationale
The Geoscience community is increasingly taking advantage of the exciting opportunities that state-of-the-art and cutting edge information technologies (IT) offer to efficiently apply a rapidly growing quantity of observational, measured, and computed data to science and education. Projects are being planned, proposed, and developed on various scales to improve the preservation and management of the data, to provide easy access to these data for all interested audiences from researchers and educators to students and the general public, and to link and integrate related data types to facilitate and enhance their analysis and to support new cross-disciplinary approaches to scientific questions.

Within the Geosciences, data management systems are frequently built with limited scope and objectives defined to satisfy the immediate needs of specific disciplines, communities, and programs. While this clearly is the preferred approach to maximize the usefulness of the systems and encourage participation and support of the community, it may lead to redundant development efforts and divergent data standards, as well as to “artificial” separation of equivalent types of data, which can make the application of the full data set to broader and global questions more cumbersome. One such separation has occurred along the ‘waterline’ into systems for marine data on the one hand and terrestrial data on the other. An example is the detachment of geochemical data for igneous rocks in three separate databases – PetDB for the oceanic crust, NAVDAT for the Western North American continent, and GEOROC for ocean islands and convergent margins. All three databases handle identical data and metadata, and they all use the same database schema developed by PetDB and GEOROC (LEHNERT et al. 2000), but the data sets are isolated from each other and there is currently no way to explore the complete data set at once.

First steps to work across the waterline are taken by CHRONOS (www.chronos.org) with respect to paleontologic data. CHRONOS is partnering with PaleoStrat (www.paleostrat.com) to build chronostratigraphic and sedimentary geologic databases for the Earth sciences. Neither of the two efforts have developed modules for geochemistry, petrology, etc. that target both marine and terrestrial data. Finally, there is the JANUS database and various databases hosted at Scripps, Woods Hole, and Lamont that neither cross the waterline nor are interoperable among themselves.

Now is the time to begin an intensive debate on the needs surrounding relational databases that would serve the sediment research community. An open and broad-based discussion is required to identify needs and support for the development of information systems that not only integrate geochemical data for both marine and terrestrial samples, but integrate the geochemistry with other essential data such as stratigraphic information and geochronology.

There are a number of reasons why we consider it likely that sedimentary databases like those that currently serve the igneous community will be developed over the next few years.

(1) Crust-Mantle Fluxes and Mass Balances: The need for a marine sediment relational database has been created simply by the existence of PetDB, NAVDAT, and GEOROC, which allow integration of virtually any combination of geochemical data, with associated metadata, on ocean floor rocks, North American volcanics, and ocean island and convergent margin volcanics. A major process that links surficial processes with the deep Earth is sediment subduction. This has wide ranging effects on the Earth System. For example, quantification is important for determining the mass balances associated with crust-mantle exchange, which affects the long term evolution of the mantle. Subducted sediments also play key roles in the genesis of many mantle plumes and convergent margin volcanics.

Understanding the balance between elements being subducted, the fluxes directly back to the surface through arc volcanism, and those to the deep mantle through recycling of the subduction-modified mantle wedge or the oceanic crust, is key for understanding how the Earth works, and a focus of the Subduction Factory portion of the MARGINS Program. Whereas complete records of the geochemistry of arc volcanics and back arc basins can be obtained relatively easily through GEOROC and PetDB, respectively, the absence of a comparable source for the sediment chemistry data means that individual PI’s still need to compile the data themselves. The lack of availability is substantially inhibiting the development of comprehensive models for crust-mantle exchange associated with plate convergence that are fundamental for understanding of the Earth System.

(2) Marine Paleoclimate Research: Marine sediments contain a large portion of the record of past global climate. A large public investment is involved in understanding the climate system, and determining the forcing and the amplifying functions. This research investment involves large scale generation of data from marine sediments that serve as proxies for changes in such climate parameters as ocean circulation, sea-surface temperature, ice sheet volume and dynamics, wind dynamics, changes in atmospheric chemistry (e.g. CO2 and other greenhouse gasses) etc.

Considering the important implications for society and future policy, it is ironic that comprehensive climate related data is among the most difficult to access. Many journals have been unwilling to publish full data tables due to cost considerations, and a large portion of paleoclimate data are published as figures rather than numbers. This situation has been only partly mitigated by the advent of electronic publishing. While repositories (e.g. NGDC and Pangaea) exist where investigators may “deposit” data, they contain only a small fraction of the climate-related data. Moreover, the archived data is in the form of individual data tables as contributed by investigators, and do not offer the advantages currently enjoyed by the igneous geochemistry community. The existence of relational databases would revolutionize paleoclimate research by simply making data accessible in electronic format on a large scale. Such accessibility would facilitate large-scale data integration, which is difficult under current conditions. In addition, its existence would solve the problem of journals refusing to include data tables by establishing a central location for numerical data in a rational and accessible format.

(3) Continental Sediments: The continental sedimentary record is an archive of the history of the Earth through time, including the evolution of the mantle-crust system, tectonics, the atmosphere, life, and climate. Currently there are major initiatives considering how to integrate the many important aspects of it. These include the partnership between CHRONOS and PaleoStrat, which is developing informatics approaches on geochronology, biostratigraphy, chemostratigraphy, the geological time-scale, physical stratigraphy, and sedimentology. Finally GEON (www.geongrid.org) is also working on defining the needs of terrestrial-based sedimentary geology.

Interoperability of Databases
Databases typically serve different research communities, and for many programmatic and practical reasons they will continue to be a distributed system. For example, JOI will continue to generate databases on geophysical and geochemical measurements during cruises, along with metadata, MARGINS will administer a data management system that will combine geophysical and geochemical data associated with that program, CHRONOS and PaleoStrat will focus on issues related to geochronology and stratigraphy. Relational databases are likely to be developed on sediments for the reasons given above. Tools for evaluation of data (through GIS, MapApp, etc.) will continue to be developed. Taking all of this into account, the need for seamless interoperability of these databases is crucial to optimize their usefulness to the community. The research needs for using combinations of data that reside in a variety of data repositories are easy to imagine, and seemingly endless, but we give two examples here.

• A full understanding of the climate system requires comparison of conditions in the oceans and the continents. Integration of data from marine and continental sediments, and ice cores, can be greatly facilitated if important data can be extracted from several databases with a minimum of effort, and in an easily usable form. For example, marine sediments record the last 170 million years, a time period that also covers a large fraction of the continental sedimentary mass. An investigator may want to target time slices and compare the predictions of climate models to actual data from the oceans and on the continents. Or alternatively one might want to integrate electrical conductivity, down core temperature, magnetic susceptibility, color, heat flow, and geochemistry, along with important metadata in a deep sea core. Such queries might extract information from JANUS, PaleoStrat, CHRONOS, and continental and marine geochemistry databases, and in addition access a web-based Tools program for data evaluation. Interoperability of these different systems is crucial for success.
   
• Studies of volcanism associated with plate convergence might seek to compare physical and chemical subduction inputs with volcanic outputs, either on local (individual volcanoes or a single arc) or global scales. Or they might seek to address issues related to the evolution of arcs through time. In any case, they are likely to require extraction of different kinds of data from several different databases, for example, some combination of GEOROC for arc lavas, PetDB for back arc basin lavas, a sedimentary geochemical database for nearby sediments, the MARGINS database for gravity, heat flow, conductivity, accretionary prism thickness, convergence rates, convergence angles.

At this point the community needs to consider a more integrated approach for existing and emerging information systems to take full advantage of its resources. The Workshop will bring together researchers and information technology specialists to discuss the types of crucial data and metadata needs of the research community, current database initiatives, and interoperability issues.

2. Workshop Objectives
The goal of this workshop is threefold:

1. Educate participants:
   1. Scientists about ongoing projects in sediment data and geochemical data management, and about IT options and requirements to build interoperable and integrated systems;
   2. IT experts about the needs of the science community.
       
2. Define requirements for a data system such as:
   1. What data/metadata need to be included?
   2. How far do we need to integrate marine and terrestrial data?
   3. What is needed for integration and interoperability (data standards, ontologies)?
   4. What tools for map interfaces, visualization, and data analysis need to be integrated?
       
3. Community building: Begin the process of developing a community consensus on how to approach a truly integrated marine and terrestrial information system:
   1. Centralized versus distributed system.
   2. How do we agree on and implement policies for data sharing, data publication, data reporting?

The goal for this workshop is to generate a report with a set of recommendations on how to move forward with the development of digital information systems including databases as well as analysis and visualization tools that will fundamentally impact the way in which geochemical data of sediments are used for research and education

3. Workshop Structure
Roughly one third of the workshop will be dedicated to short presentations providing an overview of ongoing efforts within the marine and terrestrial community and within the IT community that are relevant to the development of an information system for the geochemistry of sediments and to issues such as interoperability and data integration. Two-thirds of the workshop will be assigned to work group sessions and plenary discussions to summarize and synthesize the results of the work group sessions in a well-defined recommendation for the future of data management for sediment geochemistry.