NSF Award
2411182
Global sea level rise and associated socioeconomic impacts will be one of the most significant challenges facing society this century. However, ice sheet models, used to predict sea level outcomes for policy making, remain under-constrained. Improvements in ice sheet modeling occur via testing simulations of ice change against known histories of ice sheets. These histories are derived from records of ice-sheet response to episodes of planetary warming in recent Earth history, which hinge on geological dating methods. The most widely applied method to accomplish this task is radiocarbon dating, where thousands of analyses (past and ongoing) are ever more precisely pinning down the timing and rates of past ice sheet changes. Radiocarbon dating, however, is an analytical method that is constantly undergoing improvements. Hence, legacy data require constant updating, and the discipline is challenged in making best use of this valuable and growing resource. To date, there is no centralized, live, maintained community resource available to maximize use of radiocarbon information. To make a leap in ice-sheet model improvement, the community must first be enabled with an easily accessible and dynamically updated source of radiocarbon data. This project will develop a transparent-middle-layer data management and analysis tool to enable synoptic applications of radiocarbon datasets for the development of accurate ice-sheet histories. The project team will work directly with the ice sheet science community to ensure community buy-in and utilization of the radiocarbon data management and analysis tools via in person community workshops and virtual tutorials, both associated with existing annual conferences, and those targeted at specific user bases. The proposed research tool seeks to sustain scientific innovation at Earth's poles and reaches across disciplinary boundaries of polar, oceanographic, and Earth science research. As such, the developed computational infrastructure is comprehensive and interoperable, and has potential to make significant impact in a broad array of disciplines. This work is guided by Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) principles, with a key emphasis placed on working toward improved data accessibility, rescue, and re-use.<br/><br/>This project will develop a transparent-middle-layer data management and analysis tool to enable synoptic applications of radiocarbon geochemistry, geochronology, paleoclimatology, and carbon-cycle research around Earth's remaining ice sheets. At present, geologic constraints on past ice sheet change derived from marine archives are scattered across decades of publications and static data repositories. The lack of cyberinfrastructure to simultaneously analyze and utilize past constraints from all environments, thus, leaves researchers to the laborious tasks of data rescue, compilation, and standardization at an individual level, ultimately limiting the research community's ability to carry out transformative research. The development of Radiocarbon Cyberinfrastructure (RAD-CI) seeks to improve scientists' ability to evaluate the changing role of the polar cryosphere in Earth's climate system, as it will offer a means by which geological constraints on past ice sheet change can be dynamically compiled, calculated, and utilized in data-model comparison efforts. RAD-CI answers the calls of the National Academies report on Future Directions for Southern Ocean and Antarctic Nearshore and Coastal Research (NASEM, 2023) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (Meredith et al., 2019), which both urge the polar research community to employ geologic constraints on past ice sheet change to validate models that project future sea level rise. This project seeks to sustain scientific innovation at Earth's poles by catalyzing fundamental discovery of the role of existing ice sheets in Earth's changing climate system, which will help to develop tools and numerical modeling techniques to prepare, mitigate, and adapt to risks associated with climate change.<br/><br/>This award by the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure is supported by the National Discovery Cloud for Climate initiative within the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
