THE CO-EVOLUTION OF THE GEO- AND BIOSPHERES: AN INTEGRATED PROGRAM FOR DATA-DRIVEN, ABDUCTIVE DISCOVERY IN THE EARTH SCIENCES

Earth's living and non-living components have co-evolved for 4 billion years through numerous positive and negative feedbacks. Earth and life scientists have amassed vast amounts of data in diverse fields related to planetary evolution through deep time-mineralogy and petrology, paleobiology and paleontology, paleotectonics and paleomagnetism, geochemistry and geochrononology, genomics and proteomics, and more. Yet our ability to document, model, and explore these complex, intertwined changes has been hampered by a lack of data integration from these complementary disciplines. Through a program of data-driven discovery in the Earth and life sciences our group is integrating diverse data resources into a "Deep-Time Data Infrastructure". This data infrastructure is creating and merging the integrated data sets, statistical methods, and visualization tools to test hypotheses applicable to modeling Earth's past and today's changing environment. While initially focused on our planet's changing near-surface oxidation state and the rise of oxygen through deep time, new areas of research are being expanded into as new discoveries point to new investigative routes.

Major advancements from this collaborative endeavor include: adding over 200,000 mineral-locality paired data points in the IMA database and mindat.org; linking petrology, mineralogy, & geochemistry resources in/from large datasets; understanding how to properly use ‘Time’ and ‘Locality’ in global databases; the concept of “Mineral Ecology” (the realization that methods commonly employed in ecology, and statistical methods of lexicology, could be applied to large mineral data resources to discover previously hidden aspects of mineral diversity and distribution); and creating advanced visualization tools, such as 3D KLEE diagrams. Ongoing research aims to use novel technologies to further the research goals of this project.