Earth History Visualization

EHV: This team will focus initially on making our planet's history easily accessible to both public and scientific audiences.

Advisors:

Description

The term "Stratigraphy" means the geological record of Earth's history. Our goals are create applications and resources that aid in the mission of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS; which is the largest scientific body within the International Union of Geological Sciences).

This team will focus initially on making our planet's history easily accessible to both public and scientific audiences. In particular, we are building on the past Purdue-developed "TimeScale Creator" visualization system for Earth history (https://timescalecreator.org/). This application creates charts of any portion of the geologic time scale with a choice of bio-, magneto-, chemo-, and other events in Earth history.

Finally, the team will brainstorm new resources which further the global mission of the ICS. This exciting set of projects has worked directly with international geologists, and our products are serving as THE global reference for authoritative information on our planet's fascinating and complex history. The experts provide the information, and we strive to make it easy to use by the global audience with various innovative methods.

All accomplishments are put onto the public websites and free downloads for use by a global audience of geologists, earth-science students and the general public.

Current goals are (1) User friendly web applications for Earth history visualization  (2) Applying data mining and machine learning techniques to the vast databases to unravel our planet's secrets  (3) Be an active part of the new "Deep-Time Digital Earth" big data science program of the International Union Geol. Sciences/UNESCO.

QUALIFICATIONS/PREREQUIRSITES:

NOTE: What is developed will be immediately posted for global users! Summer SURF or other student-research assistantships are offered to those who show the most "engineering" ability to dissect, tackle and solve problems.

Enthusiasm to tackle innovative creative projects. Some background in JAVA, JAVA-SCRIPT, and/or PERL is useful; but not required if one is interested to quickly learn.

  • PHP

  • MySQL

  • HTML

  • Java

  • GD

  • Linux

  • Website development

  • Java development

Articles:

Making Earth History More Accessible

Sponsors/Partners

  • Geologic TimeScale Foundation

  • International Commission on Stratigraphy (subcommission for Stratigraphic Information).