CIRDLES.ORG - GEOCHRONOLOGY CYBER INFRASTRUCTURE OF MARS, TOPSOIL, CHRONI, ET_REDUX, AND SQUID WORKING WITH SESAR TO SUPPORT GEOSCIENCE

The Cyber Infrastructure Research and Development Lab for the Earth Sciences (CIRDLES.org) is an undergraduate software development facility at the College of Charleston. Faculty and students in CIRDLES collaborate with those from the earth sciences at other institutions to research and develop an ecosystem of software products that support geochronology and interact with products from the System for Earth Sample Registration (SESAR), such as Geochron.org, via the use of the International Geo Sample Number (IGSN), a unique identifier for a sample. A primary goal of this work is to provide facilities in the software products that ease the burden on scientists of 1) collecting and collating metadata about their data and analyses, and 2) registering their samples and results with IGSNs in a way that supports their own and the community’s management, both electronic and physical, of these artifacts.

Our suite of products is under continuous improvement in an open source context, located at github.com/CIRDLES. The suite includes

1) MARS - middleware for assisting with the registration of samples: MARS is designed to serve the needs of repositories with thousands of legacy samples by providing automation that maps diverse local metadata schema to SESAR’s schema and then supports the bulk upload and registration of sample metadata and the return of newly assigned IGSNs to the repository;

2) Topsoil - an anagram of and replacement for Isoplot: Topsoil is evolving into a visualization library for geochronological data that can be used stand-alone or in other applications and eventually as a webservice in support of visualizations of IGSN-registered samples archived in repositories such as Geochron.org.

3) CHRONI: a mobile application that interacts with Geochron.org using IGSNs to provide for customizable views of archived data and visual artifacts for scientists in the field.

4) ET_Redux: the workflow automation engine that many geochronologists use for Uranium-Lead-Thorium dating with Thermal Ionization and Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (TIMS, LA-ICP-MS) that supports IGSN-based sample registration.

5) Squid: a new workflow automation tool for Sensitive high-resolution ion microprobe (SHRIMP) - based Uranium-Lead geochronology that will also support IGSN-based sample registration.