|
|
-
Central hub
Department of Geological and Atmopsheric Sciences to host multi-campus
NSF grant.
- Two years and $2 million.
The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, the U.S. Geological
Survey, Purdue University and the San Diego Super Computer Center.
Not a bad start for CHRONOS (which means time in Greek), a National Science
Foundation (NSF) funded project coordinated by Cinzia Cervato, assistant
professor of geological and atmospheric sciences.
But that's just the beginning Cervato says.
"Eventually we hope to get several more institutions involved in the
project over a six-year period," Cervato said.
Some of the institutions that will become involved in CHRONOS at a later
date include Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Texas A&M and several international
institutions and scientific groups.
Through it all, however, Iowa State will serve as a central hub, coordinating
a continually expanding network of individual databases, linked by geologic
time. In the initial round Iowa State will receive $850,000 in funding and
Cervato, who is coordinating the instructional technology portion of the
project, hopes that future funding could top out at several million additional
dollars.
CHRONOS 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."
Along with a time scale sequence of events, the NSF grant will allow for
the development of visualization tools. Cervato anticipates utilizing Iowa
State's Virtual Reality Center to create some of these.
A retreat of all the current and potential participants as well as NSF administrators
was held on the Iowa State campus in late August. Cervato hopes that meetings
like this and the work at Iowa State will allow the consortium to develop
a web portal (www.chronos.org) from where people can access databases and
to create a "science GOOGLE" at the conclusion of the initial
two-year grant.
Future plans include the development of an outreach program with educational
modules 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."
Around LAS
October 6-19, 2003
|
|
