A PowerPoint presentation of the recommendations of the Chronostratigraphic Database Workshop is available here.


The vision for the decade ahead in 'NSF GEOSCIENCES BEYOND 2000: Understanding and Predicting Earth's Environment and Habitability' emphasized 'a commitment to improve and extend facilities to collect and analyze data on local, regional, and global spatial scales and appropriate temporal scales' in which 'massive data archiving and distribution systems, both hardware and software, are required to provide access to geodata'.

A basic goal of Stratigraphy is to reconstruct the history of the Earth and eventually of extraterrestrial bodies. It is the heart of geology. Stratigraphy makes possible the synthesis of a unified geological science from its component parts. The aspect of age, hence Chronostratigraphy, is essential. The assembly of vast amounts of stratigraphic information into databases has created an important tool to understand past climatic, biological and geological processes and their implications for future trends on our planet. The development of integrated, interactive chronostratigraphic and stratigraphic databases is indispensible for future earth science.

The CHRONOS system of integrated chronostratigraphic databases was conceived by a workshop of 30 stratigraphers from academics, industry, government, and international institutions.

  • A key mission of CHRONOS is to produce a dynamic, global timescale to frame Earth history events and processes for societal benefit.
  • CHRONOS will include all chronostratigraphic data that have adequate attribution.
  • CHRONOS will have distributed nodes coordinated through a central global hub, which will be part of NSF's Geoinformatics system.
  • CHRONOS will be under the scientific aegis of the International Commission on Stratigraphy.

Principal goals of the CHRONOS system are:

  • Assembly, integration and distribution of data relevant to geologic time.
  • Maintenance of a consensus geological timescale.
  • Public outreach - Communicate to the public the importance of understanding rates in natural processes using the geological timescale.
  • Research outreach - Provide a fundamental research tool for the geoscience community and a temporal framework for understanding the 4th dimension (rates and processes).

A central CHRONOS office with a core "group" of professional stratigraphers and information technology (IT) specialists who will develop and maintain the main database system (central hub and portions of the distributed nodes). Funding, particularly at subnode level, is essential for success.

Collaborators: USGS, International programs [e.g., Internat. Strat. Comm. (ICS, under IUGS), Integrated ODP (IODP), Ocean Drilling Stratigraphic Network (ODSN)], and industry.