Collaborative Research: GEO OSE Track 1: Toward an Open Science Geologic Time Scale

The Earth’s rock record preserves a substantial fraction of its history, attesting to our planet’s unique and complex systems from which tectonics, minerals, climate, and life have emerged. The Geological Time Scale (GTS) is the authoritative calendar of Earth’s history that has resulted from centuries of observation and quantification of this rock record, and which serves as a foundation for research and innovation in Earth systems science. However, the process of GTS construction and revision has yet to evolve into an open science structure that can harness the full energy and potential of the scientific community. This project will build robust connections among disciplinary scientists, data resources, and community organizations to create a new framework of open science GTS construction. The goals of this project are to bring together scientists to: a) discover and translate the existing data, metadata, and algorithms behind the GTS, in order to establish future community-sourced best practices for dynamic time scale construction; b) plan the design of a findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) data system that leverages and adapts existing standard data formats and open source software into a community-accessible system; and c) explore how these data and algorithms can be best exposed through public-facing online tools that allow visualization and experimentation with the GTS. By engaging and coordinating an open community to lay the groundwork for production of the GTS within a public-facing system, the Open Science GTS will enable input and participation from all scientists, thus accelerating the amount and quality of data that can be compiled into the GTS and increasing its responsiveness to community needs across geoscience disciplines. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.