GIS capabilities for spatial resolution, manipulation, and dissemination of diverse data categories can enhance our capacity for project design and global-scale interdisciplinary research while offering exciting educational and outreach opportunities. We are building a GIS relational database ('TETHYS') as an aid to interdisciplinary research on the Earth's largest active plate collision belt. Recording multistage closure of Paleozoic and Mesozoic oceans, today's 'Tethyan belt' may be taken to include the circum-Mediterranean region, Asia Minor, the Mid-East, central and southeastern Asia, and western Pacific marginal seas, representing the Earth's single-most active zone of seismicity and volcanism. The planned database will comprise digital topographic and geologic information, remote sensing imagery, and geochemical, geochronologic, and seismic data relevant to studies of collision-related mantle and lithosphere dynamic processes, and to the characterization and distribution of geologic hazards.

As a first step we have designed a prototype GIS database system. This database is focused on the Tethyan Ophiolites. The available datasets in this prototype system include: 1) digitized geologic, and geodetic data, along with those for active seismicity and volcanism (developed as Tethys-scale digital maps); 2) remote sensing data for selected regions; 3) sample-based major and trace element abundances, radiometric ages, and radioactive and stable isotope abundances for major ophiolites, 4) some selected geophysical data. For the prototype database we fused ArcIMS with ArcSDE and Microsoft SQL Server. The database is fully functional, and all aspects of it will be used in the final implementation of Tethyan GIS database.

Major beneficiaries of the project should include researchers wishing to integrate results from multi disciplines. These could yield insights on a variety of lithospheric and asthenospheric plate collision responses, and opportunities for testing 'actualistic' models against the Tethyan geologic record. This Prototype GIS database builds on the existing expertise, collaboration, and datasets generated through the International Geological Correlation Project (IGCP) 430, a UNESCO-IUGS program addressing links between plate collision responses and geologic hazards.