EARTHCHEM: NEW DEVELOPMENTS

The EarthChem project (www.earthchem.org) aims to develop a comprehensive one-stop-shop for geochemistry and geochronology data. The effort has been funded by the US National Science Foundation since 2005, and has moved forward in creating a portal for a speedy integrated search of the PetDB, NAVDAT, and GEOROC databases that currently provides access to data on over 230,000 whole rock samples. In addition, a database for mantle xenoliths has been created and is in the process of being populated, and a new dataset for the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP) is being generated in collaboration with Claude Herzberg (Rutgers University).

Over the last year, we have developed several new features at the one-stop-shop to add increased functionality to the system and to respond to user and researcher comments. The first is the ability for users to submit terms to a glossary. This allows the community to suggest and define terms by constraints of age, location, rock type, and reference. For example, the Basin and Range Province is defined as the physiographic location drawn on an interactive map at the glossary page; it is further defined by age. The second addition is the ability to track the reference/author information of papers whose samples have been downloaded from the database. As users download customized datasets from the EarthChem portal, the publications that contributed data to the dataset are tracked as well as the number of samples from a publication for which data was downloaded. In this way, authors can monitor and potentially receive recognition for having their data found and downloaded from the system. The last major enhancements are standard plotting routines for TAS, Harker, and general X-Y plots.

Over the next year, the EarthChem effort will greatly expand data at the site by addition of geochemical data from the United States Geological Survey's National Geochemical Database (~400,000 samples). We are also in the process of creating systems for the compilation of geochronological data (in response to requests from those involved with the NSF GeoEarthScope project). Lastly, the one-stop-shop will expand to include mineral data.