An extensive active fault database, recently released by USGS, has been added into the GEON catalog and is available via the project portal. Type “USGS Quaternary Fault and Fold Database of the United States” in GEON Search to find this dataset. The database contains information on faults and associated folds in the United States that are believed to be sources of M>6 earthquakes during the Quaternary (the past 1,600,000 years). The GEON resource metadata also provides a URL for further information about this dataset, which is http://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/qfaults/. GEON users will now be able to make integrated maps displaying these fault locations along with other data sets available via GEON.

GEON’s high performance computing application, SYNSEIS, has recently been updated to include on-the-fly projection capability that allows more accurate structural and distance calculations. When users select a region of interest within the conterminous United States to compute synthetic seismograms, Moho and sediment data sets are re-projected to minimize distance and directional errors by using projection parameters that are centered on the area selected. Simulations are then run using this customized model. SYNSEIS allows users to compute regional synthetic seismograms within any selected region of interest across the United States. Direct access to EarthScope’s USArray stations also allows GEON users to retrieve observed seismic waveforms and compute synthetic seismograms for source and seismic wave propagation studies. SYNSEIS can be accessed at http://portal.geongrid.org/synseis. Discussion forums on SYNSEIS and other GEON applications can be accessed at http://www.geongrid.org/forums/index.php

EarthScope has a mandate to provide unified, single-point access to EarthScope data products. The goal of the EarthScope Data Portal is to provide basic search and data access capabilities for users to discover and access data using spatial, temporal, and other metadata-based conditions.

The first ES Portal milestone to demonstrate the basic connectivity between the data archive sites (IRIS, UNAVCO, ICDP) and the central data portal site (currently at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, SDSC) was achieved on time in October. This milestone involved setup of the infrastructure and platform for implementation and deployment of the basic version of the portal at SDSC; analysis, design, and implementation of web services at IRIS, UNAVCO, and ICDP; and the invocation of these services from a central composite web service at the portal site, thereby demonstrating “end-to-end” capability. A basic user interface (UI) was developed to demonstrate the connectivity and display results at the portal. The first Web service that has been implemented and demonstrated, according to original plan, is for basic station discovery, to list all Earthscope stations for a given spatial region and over a specified interval of time.

The next steps are to develop Web services to return metadata about resources that match specified search conditions, followed by the ability to select data sets from the returned results, add them to a “data cart”, and ”zip” and download all the data to the user’s site.

AutoPointTracker (APT) is an online version of the plate rotation program developed by Dr. Chris Scotese (The Paleomap Project - http://www.scotese.com/ ). APT is a stand-alone module that provides users with a straightforward means of calculating geographic paleocoordinates for their own geological data.

The first version of APT, now available via the GEON Portal, enables calculations for 38 time slices throughout the Phanerozoic (from 520 million to 10 million years ago). Future versions will include additional reconstruction ages and an option to plot results on paleomaps.

The APT tool was developed by Dr. Scotese in collaboration with Dr. Allister Rees, who leads the PaleoIntegration Project (PIP) in GEON (see http://portal.geongrid.org/pip). A PIP forum has been created and is accessible from the GEON Forums section of the GEON Portal (http://www.geongrid.org/forums/index.php). You may use that forum to post questions and comments about PIP as well as the APT tools.

GEON at American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting

GEON will again host a booth (#302 in Exhibitor’s Hall) at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco, December 10-14th. Project members will be at the booth throughout the meeting, demonstrating and discussing the new version of the GEON portal, as well as some of the new and upgraded resources and tools available there. Please plan to visit the GEON booth and learn about the latest project developments.

Several GEON researchers will give technical talks throughout this year’s AGU Fall Meeting. A list of these talks, with links to their abstracts, can be accessed here

GEON Holds Cyberinfrastructure Workshop in New Zealand

The GEON workshop in New Zealand was organized in order to discuss joint activities between GEON and geoscience and Grid projects in New Zealand and Australia. As in the US, there is growing consensus in New Zealand on the need to coordinate geoscience research more broadly, and to collaborate by sharing hard-won datasets, analysis methods, knowledge, toolsets, platforms, and resources between researchers throughout New Zealand and the wider Pacific region. With the recent initiation of the SCENZ-Grid project (Landcare Research and GNS) to establish a grid infrastructure for Geoscientists in New Zealand, and the larger scale NCRIS funded AuScope project in Australia, the ability to achieve this level of sharing and collaboration is now available.

The first day of the GEON workshop, which was held in the Department of Geology, Geography, and Environmental Science, University of Auckland, included high level discussion involving scientists and cyberinfrastructure developers from the USA, New Zealand and Australia, targeted at sharing information and improving collaboration within a broad range of e-science initiatives. The next two days focused on GEON technologies, tools, and applications. A detailed program is available at workshop site (http://www.bestgrid.org/index.php/WorkShop:Geoscience_collaboration_and_GEON_Auckland)

Among the speakers, Robert Woodcock, co-PI of the AuScope project, provided an overview of e-science and e-research activities in Australia; Brendan Whiteman, provided an overview of geospatial activities in New Zealand; Tim Chaffe, provided an overview of New Zealand’s BestGRID project; and, Robert Gibb, provided an overview of the SCENZ-GRID effort. Chaitan Baru provided an introduction to some of the US efforts in cyberinfrastructure. On the next two days, presentations on GEON technologies, tools, and applications were made by Dogan Seber, Sandeep Chandra, and Chaitan Baru from SDSC.

A number of possibilities for future collaborations and follow-up activities were discussed.

At the recent Geological Society of America meeting, held in Denver October 27-31, Ramon Arrowsmith and Chris Crosby (GEON team members from Arizona State University) joined with Dr. David Phillips from UNAVCO to teach a short course on Processing and Analysis of GeoEarthScope and Other Community LiDAR Topography Datasets. Participants in this course learned about LiDAR technology, access to publicly available datasets, software and hardware considerations for working with the data, data processing (raw or classified point clouds, digital elevation models, other derived products), and approaches for analyzing the data to answer their research questions. LiDAR-Light, Distance, and Ranging (also Airborne Laser Swath Mapping-ALSM) topographic data are of broad interest to earth scientists, with many datasets available freely (or soon-to-be) to the scientific community, especially for fault systems in the western United States via the GeoEarthscope project. These data have exciting and powerful applications in geomorphology, active tectonics, and geoscience education.The course was beyond capacity, with 22 students, and provided the opportunity to produce broadly useful tutorials for processing LiDAR data in the GEON LiDAR Workflow. See http://lidar.asu.edu/07GSA_lidar_shortcourse.html for the tutorials, informative powerpoints, and more information.

Prof. Arun Agarwal, PI of the iGEON-India project, and Ashraf Memon (SDSC), attended the PRAGMA 13 meeting and gave presentations and demonstrations related to GEON. Prof. Agarwal was a keynote speaker, and gave a talk entitled “GEON: Networking Indian Geoscience Community through iGEON.” A demonstration was also provided on data sharing between the GEON portal and the iGEON node at the University of Hyderabad, India.

A presentation on the GEON portal and related technologies was also given at the PRAGMA Geosciences working group meeting (co-chaired by Ashraf Memon, on behalf of GEON). There was considerable interest in utilizing the GEON portal technologies for other geoscience projects in other PRAGMA countries, among the group.

Conference Website: http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Conferences/PRAGMA13/

As part of our on-going collaboration with colleagues in India (see article in August 2007 Newsletter), the project hosted visits to SDSC by Prof. Arun Agarwal and PhD student, Ms. Parvathi Kumar, both from the University of Hyderabad, India. After attending the PRAGMA-13 meeting (see article above) Prof. Agarwal—who is one of the PI’s of the iGEON-India effort—spent about 1 week at SDSC, followed by a visit to Penn State, where Prof. Mark Gahegan is one of the PI’s of GEON and also a PI of iGEON-India. Prof. Agarwal discussed various new tools and capabilities that could be developed by the Indian partners for incorporation in GEON. Also, several thesis projects were identified for Master’s students to undertake in India.

Ms. Kumar (pictured), a PhD student working with Prof. K.V. Subbarao (PI, iGEON-India), is visiting SDSC for 2 months, under the Indo-US grant. Ms. Parvathy has a background in geophysics and is working with Dr. Dogan Seber at SDSC on attempting to integrate topographic data from the GEON LiDAR portlet with the gravity data also available in GEON. Ms. Kumar will continue this research upon her return to India in December 2007.

At this year’s SACNAS National meeting, Prof. Ann Gates (GEON PI, UTEP) and Chaitan Baru (SDSC) co-organized a panel session on “Cyberinfrastructure: Changing the face of science and education.” The invited speakers included Dr. Jose Munoz and D. Sonia Ortega from NSF; Prof. John Fernan. Presentations are available at (http://geongrid.org/meetings/sacnas2007).

In addition, GEON sponsored travel for two student participants to this meeting, who would otherwise have not been able to attend. The students were selected by SACNAS from a pool of applicants, and the support went toward their air travel and hotel accommodations for this meeting.

Further meeting details for SACNAS can be found at http://www.sacnas.org/confNew/confClient/.