PIs plan two workshops to develop the archival conventions for the use of amino acid racemization (AAR) in studies of earth surface and sedimentary crustal processes. Data generation has been ongoing over the last 40-50 years in laboratories both in the US and internationally, but no convention or database has been agreed to for archiving such information that would be accessible to all. PIs have laid out plans for the first workshop to be held in conjunction with the 2010 annual national meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver this fall followed up by the International Meeting of INQUA to be held in Bern, Switzerland in July, 2011.
Amino acid racemization (AAR) is one of many tools used by Quaternary geologists to establish relative or numerical time scales in various types of earth-surface studies. AAR, in association with independent chronologic tools such as radiocarbon or uranium-series dating, can provide useful information over time spans ranging to > 2 million years for marine, coastal, and terrestrial geologic sequences. These records may be useful for interpretation of coastal hazards, long term climate histories, sedimentary depositional processes, or evolutionary change. AAR methods were first discovered in the late 1960’s, and over the course of the past 40+ years several dozen laboratories have been active, although presently this number is less than 10*, the most active and established being in the US, UK, Spain, and Australia. As with many other disciplines in geochronology and other scientific fields, there is a pressing need for the AAR community to establish procedures for long-term data preservation in order to serve future scientific researchers. This project had two fundamental goals. The first was to develop a set of procedures for the AAR community to use for archival data preservation, and the second was to use two workshops (fall 2010 and summer 2011) along with an international symposium (July 2011 International Quaternary Association, Bern, Switzerland) to present these procedures as well as current results from the AAR community for publication. The 2011 symposium will result in a collection of papers to be published in a special issue of the Elsevier journal Quaternary Geochronology; as of October, 2012 nine of the anticipated 14 papers covering various aspects of the application of AAR to earth surface processes are already available as on-line publications. Colleagues from the US, UK, Spain, Australia, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, Gibraltar, and Canada have contributed to this special issue. The fall 2010 workshop was held over two days in Boulder and Denver, Colorado; it involved representatives of the active AAR labs in the US, plus representatives from the NOAA-World Data Center (NOAA-WDC). At this workshop, procedures were developed for hosting AAR datasets on the NOAA-WDC server. Over the course of the past 24 months, the US AAR labs have contributed datasets to this site: www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/aar.html Many more datasets are planned, as all AAR investigators understand the importance of preservation of locality and analytical information for future studies. The NOAA site is itself a work-in-progress, as it is expected that more detailed geographic links will be developed as additional datasets (with world-wide distribution) are compiled. Nevertheless, the primary goal of the 2012 workshop was to establish procedures for posting these datasets, and the US contingent of AAR labs has set the examples that can be followed by our international colleagues in this effort. A related approach to data management and preservation is the on-going effort to develop a series of publicly –available maps showing areas (and localities) where AAR studies have been conducted. Ideally these maps will include information from both published and unpublished studies. Listed below are a few examples from published studies associated with research conducted at the University of Delaware (data files for these studies are all found at the NOAA-WDC AAR site): A series of publications on the use of AAR and other dating methods to correlate marine terraces along the U.S. Pacific Coast: Kennedy et al. 1982: US Pacific coast aminostratigraphy - http://bit.ly/QVH4wi Rockwell et al., 1992: Santa Barbara County, California - http://bit.ly/QVHrH9 Kern and Rockwell 1992: San Diego County, California - http://bit.ly/QVH0fR A series of publications on the use of AAR and other dating methods to interpret the history of Quaternary deposits in the coastal plain of North Carolina, U.S.A.: York et al., 1989; York and Wehmiller, 1992; Riggs et al., 1992; Wehmiller et al., 2010 - http://bit.ly/QVHN0y The map found at the link below presents all the sites (known to this author) where AAR data are available for marine cores: http://bit.ly/Symlxf Maps such as these are only one component in the effort to serve the broader scientific community in documenting the available information about Quaternary geology, stratigraphy, history, and paleoenvironmental change. Additional maps will be prepared for various study areas showing the availability of not only AAR data but also other geochronological and paleontological information so that multiple datasets can be compared. On-going efforts within the AAR community will continue to build these public datasets for future use by Quaternary scientists world-wide. *Currently active Amino acid racemization laboratories: Northern Arizona University, USA http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~dsk5/AAGL/ University of Colorado, USA http://instaar.colorado.edu/research/labs-groups/amino-acid-geochronology-laboratory/ University of Delaware, USA www.geosci.udel.edu/wehmiller/home York University, United Kingdom www.york.ac.uk/chemistry/staff/academic/o-s/kpenkman/ University of Wollongong, Australia www.uow.edu.au/science/eesc/eesstaff/UOW002975.html Laboratorio de Estratigrafía Biomolecular, José E. Ortiz and Trinidad de Torres. Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros de Minas de Madrid, C/Ríos Rosas 21, 28003, Madrid, Spain
