The extending Ocean Drilling Pursuits (eODP) Project: Synthesizing
Scientific Ocean Drilling Data
Abstract
For over fifty years, cores recovered from ocean basins have generated
extensive fossil, lithologic, and chemical archives that have
revolutionized the fields of plate tectonics and oceanography, and
significantly improved our understanding of climate change. Although
scientific ocean drilling (SOD) data are openly available after each
expedition, formats for these data are heterogeneous. Furthermore,
lithological, chronological, and paleobiological data are typically
separated into different repositories, limiting researchers’ abilities
to discover and analyze integrated SOD data sets. Emphasis within Earth
Sciences on adhering to FAIR Data Principles and the establishment of
community-lead databases provide a pathway to unite SOD data and further
harness the scientific potential of the investments made in offshore
drilling. Here, we describe a workflow for compiling, cleaning, and
standardizing key SOD records, and importing them into the Paleobiology
Database (PBDB) and Macrostrat, systems with versatile, open data
distribution mechanisms. These efforts are being carried out by the
extending Ocean Drilling Pursuits (eODP) project. eODP has processed all
of the lithological, chronological, and paleobiological data from one
SOD repository, along with numerous other datasets that were never
deposited in a database; these were manually transcribed from original
reports. This compiled dataset contains over 78,000 lithological units
from 1,048 drilling holes from 390 sites. Over 26,000 fossil-bearing
samples, with 5,280 taxonomic entries from 13 biological groups, are
placed within this lithologic spatiotemporal framework. Information is
available via the PBDB and Macrostrat application programming
interfaces, which render data retrievable by a variety of parameters,
including age, taxon, site, and lithology.