EARTH: Developing a Cyberinfrastructure for the Geosciences

Alexandria, VA - The world is buzzing with the hum of servers containing terabytes of the world’s collective datasets. And the geosciences are no different. Geoscientists are awash in data like never before. The challenge now for the geoscience community is how to best integrate disparate datasets for communal use and establish uniform standards for data entry.

Communities of computer scientists and geoscientists are coming together to tackle the challenge of how best to integrate the wealth of data describing the earth system and to encourage geoscientists to dust off their personal collections for integration into the cumulative data cloud. EARTH explores the future of geoinformatics and examines how collaborations, such as EarthCube, are starting to advance the conversation. It’s an exciting time to be researching and building the cyber underpinnings of the geosciences.

Read the complete article on Big Data in the geosciences in the September issue of EARTH Magazine, available online at: http://bit.ly/170cAmy. For the complete issue, including discussions on Earth’s innermost secrets, an interview with geoscientist Tanya Atwater, and new high-definition archaeological techniques used to understand obsidian arrowheads, visit the EARTH Magazine Digital Newsstand: www.earthmagazine.org/digital.