Workshop Support: Establishing Data Reporting Requirements and Data Archiving for U-Series Dating

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This award will support a two-day workshop to establish data reporting requirements and procedures for the U-series dating method. The effort is between the EarthChem and EARTHTIME projects, and has some sponsorship from the British Geological Survey (BGS). The workshop will be held on June 21 and 22, 2010, at the BGS in Nottingham, UK. The main technical challenges are to establish required reporting requirements including specific data and metadata items. Optional requirements will also be identified. In addition, we will explore software approaches via data reduction packages using XML communication or web form interaction to submit data to the Geochron database at EarthChem.The U-series dating method relies on the time it takes the various intermediate but still radioactive daughter products of Uranium decay to reach a stable configuration. At first, the daughter elements are not present in equilibrium concentration ? this is established over a period of a few hundred thousand years. The method is very powerful for establishing ages of recent volcanic and marine deposits, particularly on samples less than around half a million years old. The workshop is to make the reporting of results complete and transparent. In this way, samples from different labs and/or using different procedures and equipment can be compared on an equal basis. In addition, the workshop should establish a way for these data to be reported and ultimately discovered by a wide variety of users, including researchers, students, and other interested individuals. In this way, events such as volcanic eruptions, sea level and climate changes, and a myriad of other recent geological phenomenon can be better understood and integrated with related data.