Category:Marine Sediment Working Group

Credit: Hannes Grobe (Own work) CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Overview

In the Linked Earth context, a working group (WG) is a self-organized coalition of knowledgeable experts, whose activities are governed herewith. This page is dedicated to the discussion of data and metadata standards for marine sedimentary archives (see this page for a definition of Marine Sediment Archive), and aims to formulate a set of recommendations for such a standard.

Members

The group currently has one coordinator, Julie Richey (USGS)

Specific tasks

We recommend that discussions focus on the following considerations, and explore potential commonalities.

For each observation type, we recommend:

• structuring discussions around what scientific questions one would want to ask of the data
• listing essential, recommended, and optional information for:
  • the measurements themselves
  • any inference made from the measurements (e.g. calibration to temperature)
  • the underlying uncertainties, and what those numbers correspond to (e.g. 1-sigma or 2-sigma?)
• providing an ideal data table, so the community knows what to report and how to report it.
• providing separate recommendations for new and legacy datasets, and for how to label measured and inferred variable (e.g. Mg/Ca is measured, temperature is inferred)
• thinking about how the rest of the paleoscience community, or other (non)scientists may make use of the data you describe.

Marine sediments are a very ubiquitous archive on which many types of observations are made, and involving thousands of people around the world. It seems wise for this WG to rally around sub-groups start dedicated to data standards about the following sensors/observation types:

Geochemical Data

Foraminiferal Geochemistry

Stable isotopes

Trace Metals

Mg/Ca

Organic Geochemistry

Alkenones

GDGTs

Compound specific isotopes

Physical Data

Grain Size

Micropaleontological Data

• Report raw counts, or if not, at least
• Minimum number of specimens counted
• Size fraction

Polls

Here are three example polls that the group might want to consider:

For NEW DATASETS:

For LEGACY DATASETS:

This is an example poll. To vote on what should be considered Legacy, see this page.