ALBERT

Description: IN23A-1065: Three large scale projects Cluster of Excellence - 'The Future Ocean', SFB574 - 'Volatiles and Fluids in Subduction Zones', SFB754 - 'Climate - Biogeochemistry Interactions in the Tropical Ocean' and the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences IFM-GEOMAR seek for a joined data management infrastructure for Kiel marine sciences with approximately 1000 researchers from various scientific disciplines. The Kiel Data Management Infrastructure (KDMI) emerges from this large interdisciplinary community, but its concept focusses on the individual scientist and its work. This individual data management approach instead of the classic project based practice avoids redundancy in data management efforts and facilitates interdisciplinary collaboration. The web-based KDMI portal is a starting point of a virtual research platform as an efficient access for all users of the centralized data management. It integrates customized personal and project communities and provides web 2.0 enabled technologies like calendars, wikis and forums supporting daily project activities. Incorporation of essential project infrastructure with a data management system emphasizes data management as part of daily scientific routines instead of different downstream operations per project. Extracting the similarities in observational sciences leads to a process oriented data management approach. Treating the emergence of data even of completely different disciplines like field observations and experimental sciences as a process allows us to store the data in a single consistent data model. The quality of data and meta data is crucial to reusability in future projects. Accordingly the KDMI approach includes peer revision as a quality assurance step within a scientific workflow definition. Utilizing a community working platform for daily scientific work results in increasing efforts put into quality assurance of data and metadata (e.g. CARINA project). Recording the data creation process itself instead of literature references is a novelty in the field of scientific documentation and a possibility to provide complete information for a future quality reassessment. This process fosters the reuse of KDMI datasets. The infrastructure of World Data Centers (WDC) and their cooperation with the Open Archive Initiative (OAI) is the aspired final publication platform for the KDMI data. An essential issue of the KDMI concept is the publication of data in a WDC either as supplement of peer reviewed journal articles or as dataset publication on their own warranting access to the data for the global scientific community.

Description: Water column data of carbon and carbon relevant hydrographic and hydrochemical parameters from 188 previously non-publicly available cruises in the Arctic, Atlantic, and Southern Ocean have been retrieved and merged into a new database: CARINA (CARbon IN the Atlantic). The data have been subject to rigorous quality control (QC) in order to ensure highest possible quality and consistency. The data for most of the parameters included were examined in order to quantify systematic biases in the reported values, i.e. secondary quality control. Significant biases have been corrected for in the data products, i.e. the three merged files with measured, calculated and interpolated values for each of the three CARINA regions; the Arctic Mediterranean Seas (AMS), the Atlantic (ATL) and the Southern Ocean (SO). With the adjustments the CARINA database is consistent both internally as well as with GLODAP (Key et al., 2004) and is suitable for accurate assessments of, for example, oceanic carbon inventories and uptake rates and for model validation. The Arctic Mediterranean Seas include the Arctic Ocean and the Nordic Seas, and the quality control was carried out separately in these two areas. This contribution provides an overview of the CARINA data from the Nordic Seas and summarises the findings of the QC of the salinity data. One cruise had salinity data that were of questionable quality, and these have been removed from the data product. An evaluation of the consistency of the quality controlled salinity data suggests that they are consistent to at least ±0.005.

Description: Altered volcanic ashes (K-bentonites) in the late Ordovician (Caradocian) Utica shale of New York State are the product of explosive arc volcanism. Most of the 30 K-bentonites examined in this investigation contain fragmental crystals and rock fragments (microliths) up to 600 (xm in diameter that generally are neither detrital contamination from the surrounding black shale nor igneous phenocrysts. The dominant phases are garnet ($two groups; Gr_{15_20} Alm_{45_75} Py_{35_0} Sp_{2-5}; Gr_{2_5} Alm_{55_85} Py_{10-40} Spi$), plagioclase feldspar ($An{80-10}$), alkali feldspar ($Or_{99_0}$), clinopyroxene $(Wo_{50-40} En_{50-30} Fs_{0-30}$), and orthopyroxene ($Wo_{1-2} En_{77_32} Fs{32_66}4$), accompanied by lesser quantities of hornblende, aluminosilicate, quartz, sphene, Fe-Ti oxides, apatite, and zircon. Most of the fragmental crystals appear to be derived from the same source as the metamorphic microliths, which possess minerals with similar compositions. Both crystals and microliths are interpreted as xenocrysts and xenoliths from the ancient continental crust on which the Ordovician arc was constructed. They became entrained in the volcanic plume during explosive eruptions. A Precambrian age acquired on K-feldspars from one K-bentonite using the $^{40}Ar/^{39}Ar$ method shows that these xenocrysts were derived from depths of less than 5-10 km in the microcontinent at the time of late Ordovician volcanism. The occurrence of xenocrysts and xenoliths in these K-bentonites underscores the importance of performing detailed petrology on ash layers prior to the onset of more sophisticated tasks (e.g., isotopic age determinations; regional stratigraphic correlations of K-bentonites based upon chemical compositions).