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Iowa State University will serve as the lead institution for a new National
Science Foundation (NSF) two-year, $2 million grant.
Cinzia
Cervato (pictured), assistant professor of geological
and atmospheric sciences, is coordinating the project (CHRONOS)
that currently includes the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of
Natural History, the U.S. Geological Survey, Purdue University and the
San Diego Super Computer Center.
CHRONOS, a continually expanding network of individual databases linked
by geologic time, will eventually deliver a dynamic, interactive and time-calibrated
framework for Earth system history as a network of comprehensive databases
containing information related to the evolution and diversity of life,
climate change, geochemical cycles, geodynamical processes and other aspects
of the Earth system.
"Modern Earth system history research depends increasingly upon the
analysis of multidisciplinary, voluminous, time-calibrated data,"
Cervato said. "Right now that process is time-consuming and error-prone
because there are no centralized depositories or Web-enabled means of
locating and retrieving data."
The CHRONOS system will serve as a major portal for geological research
and outreach, equipped with powerful, interactive analytical and visualization
toolkits to enable the exploration and understanding of Earth. Cervato
says that with state-of-the-art information technologies and advanced
correlation tools, the implementation of CHRONOS will result in an order
of magnitude increase in the precision of global and regional geological
time scales.
"There are so many questions that we are not yet able to give more
accurate answers to without a good time scale," she said. "For
instance the timing of the extinction of the dinosaurs will be one area
we will look at. We will be able to put together so much data to make
the geologic time scale better and more refined.
"By putting events into sequence we will be able to see how life
evolved, how the climate changed, how the ice sheets grew and then melted
away."
Future plans include the development of an outreach program with educational
modules, visualization tools, and informative demonstrations of the CHRONOS
system and the study of four critical time-slices of Earth history as
"test-bed" investigations.
"Our goal is not only to make the CHRONOS system available to the
scientific community, but the general public as well," Cervato said.
"We want to make this as widely accessible as possible."
The multi-institution collaborative project will eventually involve scientists
from Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, MIT, Texas A&M
University and several international institutions and scientific groups.
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