4 D42. Recent Advances in Geoinformatics

Sunday, 10 October 2021
8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
D139/D140

DEEP-TIME DIGITAL EARTH (DDE) PALEOGEOGRAPHY DATABASES AND VISUALIZATION WITH AN INITIAL APPLICATION TO THE EAST ASIA

Paper number: 4-9
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 9:50 AM – 10:05 AM

Authors

Abstract

Paleogeography is the merger of sediment and volcanic facies, depositional settings, tectonic plate movements, topography, climate patterns and ecosystems through time. The construction of paleogeographic maps on tectonic plate reconstruction models requires a multi-year community effort that shares databases, standards and computer projection methods. One of the goals of the IUGS program for developing and deploying a Deep-Time Digital Earth (DDE) database system includes the assembly of information for paleogeographic reconstructions. The DDE working group for paleogeography established six milestones: (1) Identify and interlink existing databases that have lithology-age information; (2) Develop online lexicons for all sedimentary and volcanic formations of nations that lack those; (3) Enable capture and usability of data from publications into knowledge trees; (4) Compile existing paleogeographic atlases; (5) Target specific intervals for testing/showcasing paleogeography output from databases; and (6) Outreach modules.

An exploratory development of techniques is being applied to East Asia as a collaboration among computer-engineers, plate-modelers and stratigraphers in India (ONGC), China (Chengdu Univ. Tech., Chinese Acad. Geol. Sci.), USA (Purdue Univ., and Paleomap Project), Australia (GPlates visualization team) and Vietnam (Vietnam Nat. Univ.). Independent online lexicons with map and stratigraphic user-interfaces were developed for all formations in India and China, and partially for Thailand and Vietnam. A multi-database search system returns formations of a desired geologic stage or date from these 4 databases. With one-click, a user can plot the regional extent of all those formations on the plate reconstruction of that same age. The fillings of the formation polygons are either lithologic facies patterns or color-coded depositional environments.

A separate knowledge management system (beta version released in October) consists of an online paleogeographic encyclopedia that relies on crowdsourcing to identify, create, organize, store and share paleogeographic knowledge. It can facilitate knowledge discovery and innovation within the community and foster collaboration among community members. The management system tackles the static display issue of traditional paleogeographic maps by enabling the users to interact with maps dynamically (e.g., querying map attribute values) through GIS technology.

DDE welcomes collaborations with other national and international groups.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Vol. 53, No. 6

doi: 10.1130/abs/2021AM-369421

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