CAREER: Towards a high-resolution quantification of the North American rock record: integrating field data, citizen science, and participatory education for macrostratigraphy

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

CAREER: Towards a high-resolution quantification of the North American rock record: integrating field data, citizen science, and participatory education for macrostratigraphy The Earth's rocks contain most of our material, energy and water resources and they serve as the primary long-term archive for many important physical and biological processes, including organic evolution, the causes and consequences of global climate change, and rates and styles of mountain building and landscape evolution. Although there exists a large body of knowledge on the distribution and character of rocks and the resources they contain, there is currently no framework for consolidating this information, for placing it into a larger context, or for analyzing it quantitatively. This is unfortunate because the processes that form and destroy rocks are discontinuous and selective in time and space, resulting in a complex and heterogeneous distribution of materials at Earth's surface. Macrostratigraphy uses rock packages compiled separately at different geographic locations as a framework for integrating diverse Earth science data sets and for quantitatively analyzing the rock record. Macrostrat (macrostrat.org) currently consists minimally of the ages, thicknesses, general rock types, names, and many economic uses for >21,521 rock units from >830 geographic locations in North America. This CAREER research will use the data currently in Macrostrat as a scaffolding upon which to build a much more rigorous and complete body of knowledge on the distribution of rocks, their material properties, and their resource potential here in North America. A three-front approach will be taken to accomplish this task. First, data for new locations will be compiled from the literature and entered into the Macrostrat database. Second, a powerful new web application will be built upon Macrostrat and this will be used to enable the participation of geologists at state geological surveys, academic institutions, and the energy industry. Finally, existing locations will be updated with modern data from the literature and the field. The resultant new data compilation will not only enable the specific hypotheses concerning the geological history of carbon burial and patterns of sedimentation outlined in the proposal to be tested, but it will also serve as a platform for characterizing existing resources and formulating a new generation of questions in many domains of Earth science. Knowing where rocks occur today and when they formed in Earth history is so central to geoscience and resource discovery that it is hard to overestimate the broader impacts of assembling new, comprehensive quantitative data on the rock record and then making those data publicly accessible via intuitive and location-aware web applications. The motivations for building such web-applications stem from the fact that (1) many primary field observations are of great analytical value, particularly in combination with macrostratigraphic context, (2) many citizens who are not trained in science are nevertheless often curious about their immediate environment, and (3) some types of geological field data can be produced by nearly anyone, including students and engaged citizens, when they are provided with location-based context for their own observations. One of the most important end results of this project will be a new set of research and teaching tools that can serve needs of professional geologists while at the same time more constructively engaging students and 'citizen scientists' in the scientific process.