This wiki is the documentation for the ICE-D database project, whose purpose is to organize and work with data having to do with Earth science applications of cosmogenic-nuclide geochemistry. If you know what that means, you're in the right place.

This wiki is likely to be under construction for the foreseeable future. If you would like to contribute to any aspect of it, contact Greg Balco.

If you are interested in contributing to any part of the ICE-D project, contact Greg Balco or Ben Laabs.

The ICE-D (Informal Cosmogenic-nuclide Exposure-age Database) project is a software system for cosmogenic-nuclide geochronology that is intended to address an inherent problem with many geochronological methods, which is that one never actually measures the age of a geologic deposit – one measures some geochemical property that is related to the age.

To turn the actual measurement into a geologically useful age involves a layer of calculations that can be quite complicated and also typically depend on a variety of independently measured data. As the ingredients for the calculation layer improve over time, the age that corresponds to the geochemical measurement changes.

Comparing geochronological data collected at different times or by different labs, therefore, requires continually recalculating all of the ages from source observations with a consistent method. This is a serious headache for any Earth science application that aims to analyse a reasonably large set of geochronological data to learn about, e.g., paleoclimate, ice sheet change, or seismic hazards. The purpose of the ICE-D project is to deal with this obstacle by building a data management and analysis system that stores the raw geochemical observations and calculates ages, or other geologically useful results, dynamically when required for an analysis application.

A very comprehensive exposition of this idea can be found in a paper describing the software design, as well as in a proposal to the National Science Foundation to fund development of the system.

Although the point of the ICE-D project is to assemble any and all cosmogenic-nuclide data, we make this project more manageable by structuring it around a set of specific Earth science applications. Assembling all the data needed for focused science applications one at a time makes it possible to go from zero to useful a lot faster than trying to do the whole thing at once. At present, these are the ICE-D:ANTARCTICA, ICE-D:ALPINE, ICE-D:PRODUCTION RATE CALIBRATION, and ICE-D:GREENLAND databases.

Look here for technical details of what the major components are and how they work

Documentation on how to connect to the various components and use them to obtain data, compute geologically useful quantities such as exposure or burial ages, and incorporate data and downstream calculations into analysis or visualization.

The point of the project is to enable synoptic applications of large amounts of cosmogenic-nuclide data.

Look here for some examples in publications, meeting abstracts, and other outlets.

Look here for some DIY examples with code and (possibly terrible) documentation.

The ICE-D project grows through workshops aimed at building new components of the project and figuring out how to use the existing ones for geoscience applications. Look here for workshop plans, schedules, and materials.

Related projects that attempt to implement the transparent-middle-layer architecture, but aren't part of the core infrastructure.

The main principle is to try not to have a lot of rules and policies. Does this count as a philosophy? Anyway, there is more information |here.

The ICE-D project relies on a worldwide community of contributors and users. Look here to see who is involved, what they're doing, and how you can contribute.