The EarthScope community is currently experiencing a revolution in the volume and quality of data being collected, with the prospect of enormous amounts of data going on-line within a few years. At the same time, our ability to examine large and highly resolved data, in the face of this growing demand, is limited. This is especially true of heterogeneous datasets from varied sub-disciplines. These data should be easy to inter-compare, but normally this involves a great deal of effort and expertise that prevents common usage and ultimately hinders our ability to understand the inter-dependencies among datasets. Data assimilation and interpretation only become more difficult once the next generation of EarthScope experiments come online and researchers are flooded with ever larger numbers of data streams and even higher sample rates. If applied in a manner that provides community access and ease of use, immersive visualization can be the glue that binds together the various pieces of the geologic puzzle. Toward this end, the Visualization Center at Scripps (www.siovizcenter.ucsd.edu) is serving the EarthScope community as a visualization laboratory for the creation, collection and distribution of a library of visual objects (e.g., 3D scenes, movies and on-line tools). These visual objects form the foundation for virtual 3-D Earth models that are archived and made available to the community via established web-based portals.
