STEP community experiment December 2012

On December 11, 2012, as part of the EarthCube Experimental Stratigraphy Workshop, a community experiment was run in the STEP Basin at University of Texas. Austin. In the experiment, a delta was built into standing water as coarse sediment, fine sediment, and water were fed into the basin. The experiment ran for 8 hours, and the sediment flux, water flux, and basin subsidence were varied as pre-specified by workshop participants. After the experiment, the basin was drained and vertical slices were taken and photographed in order to see the internal stratigraphy of the delta (movie #2 below).

In the spirit of a community experiment, data from the experiments, including control programs, deposit slice images, and topographic scans, are available for analysis in the shared workshop materials folder. Direct links to the raw data are summarized at the bottom of this post. We have also set up a Community Experiment Forum to capture ideas on how to analyze these shared data. You can contribute ideas and vote on other's suggestions. See what others are saying and add your idea!

STEP Community experiment - Overhead Movie

STEP Community experiment - Deposit Dip Slices Raw

2012 December STEP Community Experiment 2012 Google Folder

• Control Programs
• Deposit Slices
• Movies
• Runlog
• Timelapse Images
• Topo Scans
  

Share your data with figshare

One goal of the Sediment Experimentalists group is to keep readers informed of new tools that may help with data management and archiving. One such tool is figshare, which "allows researchers to publish all of their research outputs in seconds in an easily citable, sharable and discoverable manner."

"figshare was started by a frustrated Imperial College PhD student as a way to disseminate all research outputs and not just static images through traditional academic publishing."

Do you share figshare founder Mark Hahnel's frustration? If so, you are encouraged to try out the site and then let the Sediment Experimentalists know about your experience (by email or blog comment). You can share and organize figures, datasets, media, papers, posters, and presentations.

More resources:

• figshare FAQ
• about figshare
• example figshare page from a Sediment Experimentalist user

Join our EarthCube group - Be informed!

Are you still confused about the entity called EarthCube? The best way to find out more is to join the EarthCube site. EarthCube has recently formed groups for all of the identified End-User communities. Since we held an EarthCube workshop in December 2012, we have a group called Experimental Stratigraphy. (Although it is named after our inaugural workshop, we plan to make the discussion more broad to encompass all Sediment Experiments.)

You are urged to sign on, join, and recruit others so that we can "provide a forum in which you can continue discussions from your workshop, post important documents (or links to your Google docs folder) and keep up the momentum generated during your workshop."

You can also check out the latest on the other groups that are active in EarthCube. This is yet another way to keep up with the multitude of opportunities available in all things data and cyberinfrastructure. It also helps to place our community on the map and draw attention to our data and cyberinfrastructure dreams.

If you haven't already, it is time to join the not-so-new experiment of Social Media:
Join the Experimental Stratigraphy Group today!