EAST AFRICAN RIFT TEPHRA DATABASE [EARTHD]: A TEPHRA COMPILATION PROJECT TO CONSTRAIN GEOLOGIC, CLIMATIC, AND HUMAN EVOLUTION EVENTS IN EASTERN AFRICA

Tephra deposits are excellent chronostratigraphic markers and prolific and widespread in portions of the East African Rift. East African sedimentary records containing tephra have typically been studied in isolation by researchers from different disciplines, and in most cases there is very little cross-disciplinary communication among, for example, sedimentologists, paleontologists, and physical volcanologists. This makes it difficult to navigate through relevant literature and limits the use of the well-documented East African tephra record to constraining the timing and rates of rifting, volcanism, climate events, and human evolution.

EARThD is a NSF funded data compilation project that is integrating, standardizing, and investigating tephra datasets from sedimentary records from the last 5 million years in the East African Rift. We are utilizing an existing NSF-supported community-based data facility, Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance (IEDA), to store, curate, and provide access to the datasets. We hire a diverse group of undergraduate students from Penn State and Salem State to enter and format tephra geochemistry, geochronology, and physical data, thus far from over 190 published papers, using a modified version of IEDA’s Petrological Database (PetDB) template. EARThD datasets will be included in the PetDB/EarthChem database and made available via the EarthChem library data repository in late fall 2019. The EARThD website (https://sites.psu.edu/earthd/) documents project progress, offers a venue for community input, a map for visualizing tephra locations, and provides instructions and direct links for searching, accessing, and downloading datasets. We aim to fulfill a crucial data integration role for researchers working in East Africa and the increasingly complex and multidisciplinary research questions being studied in this region.