Collaborative Research: A Reaction Kinetics Database for Modeling Biogeochemical Systems

Understanding how quickly environmental reactions take place is the goal of EarthKin, a geochemical database focusing on the rates of geochemical reactions. EarthKin scientists from University of Maine, Penn State, Columbia, and Saint Francis University will compile existing reaction rates into a one-stop database that will allow access to researchers working on a diverse range of projects ranging from removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and permanently storing it beneath the ground to cleaning up contaminated environmental sites. When completed EarthKin will be available to scientists free via the web at www.earthchem.org. Not only will we compile existing data, but we will also encourage new researchers to become involved by uploading their new results into the database. Recent advances in geoinformatics (the subdiscipline of developing technological and computation tools to facilitate information dissemination in the geosciences) have drastically increased access that researchers have to geological information. Many recent endeavors have focused on online publishing of large data sets in order to make data available to the wider community. EarthKin is especially interesting in that it is one of the first attempts to include experimental data in a web-based data management platform. To do this, we will need to build new tools and data structures that will allow the existing EarthChem platform to incorporate a new type of data.