Read about the latest updates and new about Tephrabase. An archive of pervious updates is also included.
You are currently using the new Tephrabase website. This new website has been developed over the last few year, with the aim of making it more accessible across a range of devices (desktop, laptops, tablets and mobiles). The now fully response website will work whatever your screensize, meaning that as long as you have reception, you can also use it in the field. Some more features will be added to enhance this in the future. Searches have been consolidated and the Laacher See data has now been fully incorporated into the European searches. All results can now be easily downloaded in a various formats and you can sort tables of data using any of the columns.
The next priority is upgrade the maps to ensure that they work better on a phone/tablet. Further features will be added over time. If you have any further suggestion, please email Anthony Newton.
Tephrabase is part of the Tephra Information Portal project. The Tephra Information Portal is envisioned as a central point of access to data resources for the community of researchers who study tephra or need access to tephra data. TIP is being built as a collaboration between the Tephra Community and the IEDA2 data facility as part of the development of the Framework for FAIR Data Communities that IEDA2 will use to improve its services and support for existing and future data communities in IEDA2 (including EarthChem, SESAR2, and LEPR/traceDs) as well as the Astromaterials Data System. Read more about the Tephra Information Portal.
The NSF-funded dataARC project is an interdisciplinary effort aimed at linking data from archaeology, paleoenvironment, paleoclimate, and the humanities to more easily address questions on the long-term human ecodynamics of the North Atlantic and beyond. dataARC builds on the pilot cyberNABO project. Pulling in professionals from informatics, data visualization, and the data creators themselves, dataARC ambitiously created a data infrastructure and digital tool that allows scientists to more easily discover, access, link, and understand these data to enable interdisciplinary research, largely building off intensive research performed by the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization. Data from Tephrabase has been integrated into this project.
Tephrabase saw its largest expansion with new data being added, as well as rewriting of some of the code and a tidying up and cleaning of the data already held in the database. This work was partly carried out through the NSF-funded dataARC project. Tephrabase is an integral part of this multinational effort, which aims to link environmental, archaeological and historical sources in the North Atlantic region. Please use the link to explore this new data resource.
Highlights include the addition of 390 new sites, 2600 tephra layers and over 2700 geochemical analyses. 170 of these new sites and 2200 tephra layers are in Iceland. The remaining sites are of distal cryotephras found in Europe. Tephrabase's growing data currently contains details of nearly 6000 tephra layers (including over 6500 geochemical analyses) at nearly 1200 sites. We have also streamlined the way that dating of Icelandic historical tephra layers are handled and attempted to deal with the multiple names that the same tephra layer may have. The automatic drawing of stratigraphic diagrams has been expanded to include all European sites and the Sediment Accumulation Rate Generator to all suitable (i.e. aeolian soil) tephra sites in Iceland. The method by which results are displayed has also been updated.
The whole system has been ported from Oracle to the open source PostgreSQL database, together with improvements to the database structure, improving the systems for adding and editing data and rewriting of the code which displays the webpages and handles searches. This is now the version you are using!