Archiving and Distributing Earth-Science Data with the PANGAEA Information System

Abstract

PANGAEA Publishing Network for Geoscientific and Environmental Data (http://www.pangaea.de) is an information system aimed at archiving, publishing, and distributing data related to climate variability, the marine environment, and the solid earth. The system is a public “data library” distributing any kind of data to the scientific community through the Internet. Data are stored in a relational database in a consistent format with related meta-information following international standards. Data are georeferenced in space and/or time, individually configured subsets may be extracted. Any type of information, data and documents may be served (profiles, maps, photos, graphics, text and numbers). Operation by Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM) is assured in the long-term. Both institutions provide the technical infrastructure, system management and support for data management of projects as well as for individual scientists. Most important collections from Antarctic research archived in PANGAEA so far are the data of the Cape Roberts Project, geological maps and age determinations of rock outcrops, a complete set of JGOFS, WOCE, DSDP and ODP data including those from the Southern Ocean, any marine sediment cores, documentation and analytical data from German expeditions and an increasing inventory of data published by the running EPICA project.