A new platform to monitor the Earth’s crust
The European countries together own a mosaic of hundreds of impressive but separated research infrastructures that includes networks, observatories, temporary deployments, instrument pools, labs and modelling facilities for solid Earth studies. A sustainable infrastructure for long-term plate observations that optimises access to data and combines a wide variety of solid Earth data and modelling tools is a prerequisite to innovative research for a better understanding of Earth structure and dynamic processes. These include the physical and chemical processes that control natural events (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, tsunami), the formation of geo-resources, and Earth surface dynamics. The EU-funded project EPOS (European Plate Observing System) worked towards creating a single sustainable, permanent and distributed infrastructure, integrating geophysical monitoring networks, local observatories (e.g. volcano observatories), satellite observations and facilities in Europe. By improving and facilitating the integration, access, use, and re-use of solid Earth science data, data products, services and facilities EPOS has developed a holistic, sustainable, multidisciplinary research platform to provide coordinated access to harmonised and quality controlled data from diverse Earth science disciplines, together with tools for their use in analysis and modelling. The new platform will enable scientists to study the same phenomena from a multidisciplinary point of view, on different temporal and spatial scales (from laboratory to field and plate tectonic scale experiments). EPOS was part of a collaborative framework sharing an ambitious mission. In this framework, many diverse communities are creating the conditions to tackle the challenge of demonstrating the innovation potential of data, metadata and service integration when aiming at a science for society.
Keywords
Earth's crust, plate tectonics, Earth monitoring, computer simulations, EPOS, cyberinfrastructure