Launched in 1995, Tephrabase was the world's first tephra database available on the World Wide Web. This new version of the website was launched in June 2025, exactly 30 years after the origina version. You can search for tephra layers found in Iceland, Europe and central Mexico. Tephrabase is being integrated into the new Tephra Information Portal (TiP), more details of which will be available soon.
Tephrabase was originally designed to be used by those involved in tephrochronological research in north-west Europe. In practice, this means those working in the British Isles, Scandinavia and Iceland (the source of nearly all of the tephra layers found in this region). The aims of this project have not changed since Tephrabase was first unveiled in 1995, except that details about tephra layers and eruptions in central Mexico and other parts of Europe have been included.
More detailed information about this project can be found in Newton et al. (1997 and 2007) and Newton (1996). These are the five original aims of this project:
Details of design of the database are available from here. These include details on the tables within the database and the relationships between these tables. If you are going to donate data to the database you will find it useful to look at these pages. Also if you are setting up your own database, you might find this information useful.
There are many people who have helped with the production of this database. This project was originally funded by a grant from the Natural Environment Research Council in 1994. Since then, additional funding, from the Leverhulme Trust, has enabled further development of the system. This is particularily the case with the addition of the Mexican data. Major updates have also been made through grants from NSF, related to research through the NABO collaborative and most recently the dataARC project. Dale Cameron created the stratigraphy and SeAR tools for his MSc Geographical Information Science dissertation at the University of Edinburgh in 2011. Thanks to Oana Huminyik for all of her work updating Tephrabase and working on the dataARC project (Opitz et al., 2021).
Although it is over 30 years since the project began it is important to acknowledge the original help of those people without whom Tephrabase would not have worked. Particular thanks must go to Bruce Gittings (School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh) for designing the original interface with Oracle, maintaining the then Geography WWW server and building the original Tephramap part of the system. Steve Dowers (Institute of Geography, University of Edinburgh) helped with the more technical sides of the database development, especially with the Oracle CASE and Developer 2000 software. Malcolm Murray always gave enthusiastic support and the Tephrabase logos are his and his comments on the original WWW page design were invaluable. More recently, updates to the scripts and the porting of the database from Oracle to PostgreSQL was greatly helped by Shane Vos and Chris Hill resepectively from the School of GeoSciences. Hjalti Guðnundsson helped with the original translation of some of the Icelandic literature.
Guðrún Larsen and Jón Eiríksson (Science Institute, Reykjavík) and Andy Dugmore (Institute of Geography, University of Edinburgh) provided constructive and essential comments that shaped the original database design and structure and helped hugely with the tephrochronological and volcanological aspects. This was in addition to the many helpful comments and feedback from the tephrochronological community in the early to mid 1990s at various tephra meetings.
The addtion of the Laacher See data was only possible with the cooperation of Felix Reide (Aarhus Universitet)
Opitz, R., Strawhacker, C., Buckland, P., Cothren, J., Dawson, T., Dugmore, A., Hambrecht, G., Koster, W., Lethbridge, E., Mainland, I., McGovern, T., Newton, A., Palsson, G., Ryan, T., Streeter, R., Stade, E., Szabo, V., and Thompson, P. (2021) A Lockpick’s Guide to dataARC: Designing Infrastructures and Building Communities to Enable Transdisciplinary Research. Internet Archaeology 56.
Riede, F., Bazely, O., Newton, A.J. and Lane C.S. (2011) A Laacher See-eruption supplement to Tephrabase: Investigating distal tephra fallout dynamics. Quaternary International 246(1-2), 134-144.
Newton, A.J., Dugmore, A.J. and Gittings, B.M. (2007) Tephrabase: tephrochronology and the development of a centralised European database. Journal of Quaternary Science 22, 737-743.
Newton A.J., Gittings B., Stuart N. (1997) Designing a scientific database Query Server using the World Wide Web: The example of Tephrabase. Innovations in GIS 4, Taylor and Francis, London, 251-266.
Newton A.J. (1996)Tephrabase. A Tephrochronological Database. Quaternary Newsletter, 78, 8-13.