Intellectual Merit: Over the past three decades, digital seismic reflection techniques have played a major role in advancing our understanding of a wide range of Earth problems, from the history of sea level rise and earth's past climate, to oceanic crust formation, to the structure of tsunamogenic faults zones at subduction boundaries. Seismic reflection data, while of high value for a broad range of studies, are also costly to acquire. Preservation of these data is essential to maximize their utility and ensure they remain available for future uses beyond those envisioned by the originally funded NSF project. Two linked marine seismic data centers have been developed that serve digital collections of NSF-sponsored projects going back to the first acquisition projects in 1974. These centers contain field and processed data that currently exceeds 10 TB, along with data access, discovery and visualization tools. New developments in geoinformatics hold great promise for expanding access to these digital collections and broadening participation in geoscience research.
In this project seismic reflection field data and subsequently processed data will be captured and preserved, including data from the new National Marine Seismic Facility, the R/V Langseth, the only dedicated academic seismic ship. Aggregation and preservation of newly generated seismic data will continue, including processed data from single channel projects from any UNOLS ship, and for some others where field seismic data not being systematically archived. Older field and processed data will also be captured and preserved from more than 50 programs of which ~30 are dispersed mostly among scientists. A mechanism will be developed to track data submissions, which should help the scientific community and NSF evaluate compliance with data sharing guidelines. Seamless metadata interoperability will be developed across the two data centers to demonstrate the ability of distributed data centers to provide the underlying metadata and services aligned for modern discovery, analysis and sharing. The key legacy of this project is to enable more complete discovery of and access to seismic reflection data in the public domain, some directly, through the holdings in these two data centers, and much more from promoting a shared metadata framework with other resources for seismic data in the U.S.
Broader Impacts: This system provides a simple way for scientists to share data thereby promoting academic research and education and meeting NSF expectations for sharing the data, samples, physical collections, and other supporting materials created or gathered in the course of the work. The impact from the ongoing seismic archiving and distribution projects within the two data centers is significant and widespread; over 37,000 seismic files have been amassed, representing much of the legacy of modern academic marine seismic reflection exploration, and over 16,000 files have been distributed to a wide variety of users from academic, government and commercial enterprises. These digital data collections will be usable for more advanced research tools (e.g., GeoMapApp) as well as new tools as they are developed.
This project was a collaborative effort between the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. It was designed to preserve high-impact, high-cost digital reflection seismic data collected by academic scientists. This is a report of the UTIG project outcomes. Seismic data are used for a variety of purposes, for instance, to make images below the seafloor (much like layering and folding seen in highways cutting through hillsides). Also, these data are used to assess rock properties (how dense are the sediments and rock layers, giving clues as to the type of rocks and fluids). The data directly image major subduction zone faults and active ocean ridge magma chambers. The first objective was to stabilize the UTIG informal institutional tape archives and those of hundreds of individual investigators at other academic institutions. This effort included the original raw data and versions processed for project-specific goals. The second objective was to improve access to these data using modern data storage systems, relational databases and the high-speed Internet. We developed standardized metadata, which includes geographic location, acquisition and processing histories, publications, and the names scientists involved in the original projects. All this information is linked to web-based maps and keyword search capabilities that provide access to interested students, scientists and the public. Most data include small images and captions to provide the observer with insight into the data coverage and quality. The UTIG online data center grew to 359 projects with 36,164 primary seismic data files totaling 6.9 Terabytes in size. These projects were mostly month-long cruises on academic ships that collected seismic data to support a specific investigation. Through the portal at UTIG (www.ig.utexas.edu/sdc) about 200 new user accounts are established each year for data access, with about 20,000 files transferred out each year. The most ‘popular’ downloads are just as commonly data collected in 1974 as 2010, providing evidence of the long-term value of these data. Most of the users are from educational or governmental institutions around the world (~67%) with a significant group of commercial users (~18%). One-third of the users are from within the United States the rest from 89 other countries. We continue to locate and preserve data sets as they are collected and provide discovery and access to these public–domain data.
