The Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) is a 10-year international research initiative to connect scientists from diverse fields and facilitate collaborative research and technology development in the field of deep carbon science.
In order to address barriers to communicating the planetary carbon cycle to the public, a Modeling and Visualization workshop was held in May 2015 in Washington D.C. to bring together deep carbon researchers and modelling and visualisation experts. The workshop, attended by EarthByte’s Sabin Zahirovic, highlighted the necessity of developing models of deep-Earth and deep-time carbon budgets.
Our DCO-commissioned project, Spatio-temporal modelling of deep time atmospheric carbon flux from subduction zone interactions, specifically addresses this goal by using plate reconstructions and cutting-edge, open-source community frameworks to communicate mantle-curst-atmosphere interactions in the deep carbon cycle.
As a result of the project, the EarthByte team including Dietmar Müller, Sabin Zahirovic, Sam Doss and Jodie Pall in collaboration with Rice University, Caltech and the University of Melbourne has produced an outreach toolkit for deep carbon science applications which utilises the community infrastructure of GPlates and pyGPlates.
The purpose of this blog is to describe the methodology, tools and processes we went through to create the tools that help in answer questions about deep carbon dynamics occurring at subduction zones.
To access the toolkit we created for the project, please sign up to the DCO Data Portal or access the data directly from here.
For more information on the DCO, please visit the website: www.deepcarbon.net.
