Environmental Technology, News

Creating a tool for understanding multidimensional data

25 scientists and students are testing out software from CMR in an earthquake workshop. The Enlighten-web tool from CMR is an important part of a new Norwegian e-infrastructure for Solid Earth Sciences.

– Few tools gives this possibility. Enlighten-web creates a simplified process and makes it possible to achieve  new knowledge. In Enlighten-web you can combine data sets from different disciplines such as geophysics and geology.

Kuvvet Atakan is enthusiastic. The earthquake professor, together with 25 other dedicated experts from Oslo, Trondheim and Bergen, were gathered in Bergen last week to test the Enlighten-web software from CMR. Adapting Enlighten-web for analysis of earthquake related data is an important part of the ten-year project EPOS-N www.Epos-no.org. EPOS, the European Plate Observing System, is a long-term plan to facilitate integrated use of data, data products, and facilities from distributed research infrastructures for solid earth science in Europe. EPOS-N is the Norwegian part of the project. (source epos-ip.org).

The EPOS-Norway project has four work packages. CMR is responsible for one of these, where the goal is to establish a Norwegian e-infrastructure to integrate data from the seismological and geodetic networks, as well as data from geological and geophysical data repositories. This work will comprise data integration, development of a web portal and of visualization and processing tools. In another work package, the monitoring capacity especially in the arctic area will be strengthened through purchase and installation of new seismological and geodetic instruments in Nordland, on Svalbard, Jan Mayen and Bjørnøya.

The workshop

Atakan continues: – What can Enlighten-web do? Enlighten-web gives total freedom to the researcher. And researchers like freedom. The researchers can collectively capture large datasets from various disciplines such as geology and geophysics, and put them together. A simplified process and a possible process as the cases we are testing here these days.

Atakan shows us examples of the questions the participants are trying to  answer using Enlighten-web in the workshop: When (at which depth? In which geological unit) did the earthquake swarm occur? Or: Do earthquakes occur only in the crust or also below the Moho? Or: Do earthquakes occur along known faults or topographic/bathymetric lineaments?

Atakan now waits impatiently for the opportunity to set out more instruments to get more data from arctic regions. Today he has little information from the geological and geophysical conditions below the seabed. Important issues need to be answered and for this he needs more data.

 

EPOS

EPOS, the European Plate Observing System, is a long-term plan to facilitate integrated use of data, data products, and facilities from distributed research infrastructures for solid Earth science in Europe. EPOS-N is the Norwegian part of the project.

EPOS has been through a four year Preparatory Phase funded by EU-FP7, and is now in the Implementation Phase with funding from Horizon2020 (total budget 18,2 Million Euro). The University of Bergen (UiB), Department of Earth Science, has been an active partner in the project from the start, and is leading one of the work packages in the Implementation Phase.

The Norwegian National EPOS Consortium was established in 2009 with seven member institutions, CMR being one. The consortium is led by UiB. The consortium applied the Research Council of Norway for funding for the EPOS-N project. A total of 51 Million NOK was granted. EPOS-N project partners in addition to UiB and CMR are NORSAR, Kartverket, Norges Geologiske Undersøkelser and Universitetet i Oslo.

CMR owns the Enlighten-web IPR, but EPOS participants get free access to use the software.

Photo below shows Senior Scientist Ove Daae Lampe CMR instruct one of the participants under the workshop last week.