Collaborative Research: East African Rift Tephra Database [EARThD]: a compilation documenting and analyzing explosive volcanism in East Africa

东非大裂谷是数百座火山的所在地，这些火山过去曾发生过大规模的爆发，将火山灰送入大气，并将其分散到很远的地方。这种火山灰（也称为火山灰）沉积在陆地或水体中，并可能被保存在地质记录中。对火山的研究在很多方面都很重要，包括了解火山喷发的历史，预测潜在的未来行为，以及对古人类学和古气候学研究中的岩层进行关联和定年。传统上，这些工作大多是由这些不同学科的独立研究小组进行的，然后大量的数据发表在专业文献中，很难发现。建立一个关于东非火山活动的集中数据库将有助于克服这一障碍，鼓励使用现有的有价值的数据集，而且还可以回答有关东非火山活动随时间演变的基本问题。该项目将通过建立东非裂谷Tephra数据库（EARThD）来解决这一需求，这是一个综合数据库，将整合、标准化和调查来自东非裂谷的地球化学和年龄数据集，重点关注过去500万年的记录。EARThD项目将利用现有的nsf支持的社区数据设施，跨学科地球数据联盟（IEDA），通过IEDA的EarthChem图书馆存储、管理和提供对地球化学数据和元数据的访问。来自已发表文章的Tephra样本将被分配一个国际样本地理编号（IGSN），相关的数据集和元数据将使用标准化的IEDA模板输入和格式化。EARThD的发展将完成目前不存在但至关重要的数据整合和标准化工作，这些工作需要支持不断增长的东非裂谷热带记录和正在研究的日益复杂和跨学科的研究问题。它将鼓励和促进tephra地球化学数据的跨学科使用，并使本科生研究人员参与其中，从而使广泛的科学界受益。该项目的结果将使人们更清楚地了解东非裂谷爆炸性火山活动的时间变化，包括过去喷发的频率和规模以及与大陆裂谷作用有关的长期地球化学变化。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The East African Rift Valley is home to hundreds of volcanoes that have produced large explosive eruptions in their past, sending volcanic ash into the atmosphere and dispersing it over large distances. This volcanic ash (also called tephra) is deposited on land or in water bodies, and may become preserved in the geological record. Studies of tephra are important for a wide range of purposes including learning about the eruptive history of a volcano to anticipate potential future behavior, and correlating and dating rock layers for paleoanthropology and paleoclimatology studies. Traditionally, much of this work has been carried out by separate groups of researchers from these various disciplines, and a significant amount of data is then published in specialized literature, and hard to discover. A centralized database of tephra occurrence in East Africa would help overcome this barrier and encourage the use of existing valuable datasets, but also answer fundamental questions about the evolution of volcanism in East Africa through time. This project will address this need by building the East African Rift Tephra Database (EARThD), a comprehensive database that will integrate, standardize, and investigate geochemical and age tephra datasets from the East African Rift focusing on the record from the past 5 million years. The EARThD project will utilize the existing NSF-supported community-based data facility, Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance (IEDA), to store, curate, and provide access to geochemical data and metadata through IEDA's EarthChem library. Tephra samples from published articles will be assigned an International Sample Geo Number (IGSN) and associated datasets and metadata will be entered and formatted using standardized IEDA templates. The development of EARThD will fulfill the currently non-existent but crucial data integration and standardization effort needed to support the growing East African Rift tephra record and the increasingly complex and interdisciplinary research questions being studied. It will benefit a broad scientific community by encouraging and facilitating the cross-disciplinary use of tephra geochemical data and involve undergraduate student researchers. Results of this project will provide a clearer understanding of the temporal variations of explosive volcanism along the East African Rift, including the frequency and magnitude of past eruptions and long-term geochemical variations in response to continental rifting.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.