What's new with NAVDATNAVDAT recently obtained funding from the National Science Foundation for a final effort to finish populating the database with "legacy" age and chemical data from Mesozoic and Cenozoic igneous rocks from western North America (NAVDAT III). One of our main goals in NAVDAT III will be to improve the coverage of Mesozoic and younger intrusive igneous rocks. Mark Barton and Mihai Ducea at the University of Arizona are joining NAVDAT as "principal investigators" to help with this effort. Both workers have much experience in compiling and interpreting large dataset from intrusive igneous rocks in the western U.S. Some of you might remember the CONTACT database that Mark developed for intrusive rocks in western U.S. and our intent is to fold this database into NAVDAT. Along with Mark, long-time NAVDAT "PI"s Luca Ferrari and Martin Valencia will be compiling data for intrusive rocks in northern Mexico. Once completed, NAVDAT will provide the ability for investigating space-time-composition patterns in both intrusive and extrusive igneous rocks throughout the entire Basin and Range province, irrespective of international borders. Jason Ash, the current NAVDAT lead programmer, will continue in this capacity for NAVDAT III and will continue to make major improvements in the NAVDAT web portal. We are also bringing on another programmer, Eileen Jones (also through the EarthChem project) to help with NAVDAT. Together, they will continue to refine the user interface and search selections and will add options for query such as volcanic field names and creating precompiled datasets based on location, composition, and age. They are also working to improve user interactions with the website by incorporating routines for user-defined animations, data output formats, and plotting/mapping. These efforts are helped by the KGS programming team, including Asif Iqbal and Kurt Look. NAVDAT will not disappear at the end of NAVDATIII (in 2009). By this time, NAVDAT will have become a major component of the EarthChem project. Placing NAVDAT under the EarthChem umbrella will give NAVDAT the best possibility of being maintained and continually updated well into the foreseeable future Be sure to contact Doug Walker or Jason Ash with comments and suggestions, as these are key to making NAVDAT as useful a tool as possible. |