TETHYS: A GIS DATABASE FOR STUDYING AND VISUALIZING TETHYAN PLATE COLLISIONS

The Tethyan belt records continued accretion of Gondwana continental fragments to the Eurasian continent, and extends today between Gibraltar and Indonesia. Ongoing collisions of the African-Arabian, Indian, and Australian plates provide opportunities for studying the responses of both the ductile mantle and brittle lithosphere to plate collisions, and exploring how these are linked to seismicity and volcanism. As an effort to better understand their underlying, we are building an interdisciplinary GIS database (TETHYS) as a tool for studying plate collision responses in the Tethyan belt. TETHYS is predicated on a widely-perceived need for synergistic plate collision models and will combine digital topographic and geologic information, remote sensing images, geochemical, geochronologic, paleomagnetic, seismic, space geodesy, isotope geochemistry, and plate reconstruction models. The database will initially include: digital geologic maps, seismic and volcanic activity, and regional tomographic data. Detailed maps along with geochemical, thermochronology, geochronology, and isotopic data on ophiolites from Turkey, Kohistan and Indonesia are also incorporated. Initially, there will be three database servers at the University of Houston, University of Illinois, Chicago, and SUNY Buffalo. These will be configured as part of a failover replication cluster, data being replicated at regular intervals to the three servers. The database system is being integrated with ArcIMS via ArcSDE. In the next two months the University of Houston and SUNY Buffalo servers will be available at http://tethys.uh.edu/ & http://isis.geology.buffalo.edu/tethys.htm. On completion of a two-year construction phase, the database will be hosted at the University of Illinois Supercomputer Center with advanced interactive graphics and virtual reality capabilities offering immense potential for 3- and 4D visualization of TETHYS data sets. The TETHYS webserver will become a node of the national GEOscience Network (GEON); an ongoing initiative committed to creating solid earth geoscience 'cyberinfrastructure' linking other multidisciplinary geoscience databases.