Macrostratigraphy of Northern Laurasia: Testing Models of Rock Cycling and Continental Flooding

Rocks are the physical foundation of society and a long-term record of how Earth works. They contain many of the mineral, energy, and water resources people depend on, and they help regulate the movement of important elements such as carbon, phosphorus, calcium, and iron among the solid Earth, oceans, atmosphere, and biosphere. Yet for many large parts of the world, information about where rocks occur, what they are made of, and when they formed is scattered across maps, reports, and publications that are difficult to combine and analyze. This project is creating and openly sharing a new digital geologic dataset for a vast region of northern Eurasia, spanning from eastern Europe to eastern Siberia and covering about 11% of Earth’s continental crust. By making these types of data easier to access and analyze, the project will improve the foundation for research on Earth history and natural resources. The project will also develop and share inquiry-based learning activities for secondary school students, helping them build skills in working with geoscientific data while learning why rocks matter to Earth and society. This project involves compiling, standardizing, and analyzing spatially explicit geologic data for northern Eurasia, including the geographic distribution, age, lithology, thickness, and other physical properties of sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic rocks. The compiled data will be incorporated into the NSF-supported Macrostrat database, which provides open, machine-readable and human-readable information on the properties and ages of rocks in Earth’s crust. The resulting dataset will be used by the project team to quantify how preserved rock quantity varies geographically and through geologic time and to test whether models of rock cycling developed primarily from North American data apply to a larger and tectonically different region. The project will also use geospatial and statistical analyses to assess controls on continental flooding and sediment deposition, testing the relative influence of regional tectonic setting, including proximity to subduction zones and other plate-boundary features, versus global drivers such as long-term sea-level change. Expected outcomes of this project include a major expansion of Macrostrat’s public global data coverage, new quantitative tests of rock cycling and continental flooding models, and reusable data products that will support future research, education, and applied geoscience. 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.