CHRONOS NETWORK FOR EARTH SYSTEM HISTORY: DEVELOPMENT OF INTEGRATED DATABASES AND TOOLKITS ACCESSIBLE THROUGH A COMMON PORTAL

Modern Earth system history research depends increasingly upon the analysis of voluminous, multidisciplinary, time-calibrated data. The process of determining the availability or even the existence of Earth history data remains a time-consuming and error-prone enterprise because there are no centralized depositories or Web-enabled means for locating and retrieving data. Our goal is to 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. We call this network the CHRONOS system (www.chronos.org, where a complete list of project participants is available). With a ‘central hub’ coordinating a continually expanding network of individual databases linked by geologic time, the community-based 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 our evolving planet. With the wealth of existing Earth history data that can be integrated with state-of-the-art information technologies and advanced correlation tools, we also anticipate that the implementation of CHRONOS will result in an order of magnitude increase in the precision of global and regional geological time scales. This alone represents a major advance in Earth system history research, and is expected to lead to new insights into the rates and magnitudes of important geological processes, many of which are relevant to understanding Earth system changes influenced by human activity. Beyond addressing scientific issues, CHRONOS will also provide broad educational and societal benefits with contributions of readily accessible information on topics of general interest (e.g., evolution, extinctions), by supporting a large number of graduate and undergraduate students, and by facilitating studies of issues of immediate concern (e.g., global warming, climate change).