Archiving of West Antarctic Geophysical Data

This award supports a program to rescue geophysical data collected in West Antarctica (primarily seismic and radar data) over several decades by students and researchers from the Geophysical and Polar Research Center at the University of Wisconsin (UW). The data will be retrieved from the UW archives and transferred (from the magnetic tapes which they are currently on) and recorded to a more modern format. In addition, the metadata that is in field notebooks will be summarized and the entire collection will be submitted to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) where their long-term stability can be ensured. Others will do some reprocessing of the data in order to allow easier access to the data. Information about the methods of collection, formats, unwritten assumptions behind all the experiments, experiment designs, instrument settings and data formats will all be noted in the file. The window of opportunity for retrieving and archiving these data is rapidly closing and this project will help to make these data available to others for future research projects.