Workshop Support: Handling, Processing, and Archiving LA-ICPMS U-Th-Pb Geochronologic Data; December 12-13, 2009 in San Francisco, California

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This award will provide funds for a workshop that will bring together an international group of approximately 40 geochemists and software engineers to identify and develop solutions for problems in processing and archiving LA-ICP-MS U-Th-Pb data. The first day of the workshop will focus on progress made since the first community discussion of this topic (Vancouver, July 2008), and the second day will focus on using expertise acquired from the EARTHTIME and EarthChem initiatives to enhance existing data-handling systems and to develop new tools that are more robust, powerful, transparent, and user-friendly. Workshop results will be reported through EOS-Transactions of the American Geophysical Union and GSA Today.This workshop is a crucial next step in the community development of standards for acquiring, processing, reporting, and archiving U-Pb geochronologic data by LA-ICPMS. Developing these standards, and building them into the next generation of datahandling tools, will result in U-Pb ages that are more robust and more easily integrated with other types of data. This will enable researchers, students, teachers, and the general public to use geochronologic in studies of far-ranging fields such as understanding the growth of continents, processes of mountain building, generation and distribution of sediment through space and time, formation of mineral and hydrocarbon resources that are essential to our society, chronology of evolutionary changes, timing of early hominid evolution, and linkages between climate and tectonics.