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Why visualization tool for earth planetary data

More and more cross-disciplinary reseaches for the earth's inner structures are carried out these days. In these researches, it is crucial to integrate and understand research results from different fields. It would be a great help if we could have a visual presentation of different kinds of data at once.

The problem of existing visualization tools

Each research field has its own data format and has developed the visualization methods in its own way. You have to be very familiar with them to visualize data of a specific field. There are other problems in overlapping visual presentations of different research fields because there data formats, visualization methods and tools are not standardized.

The goal of this project

This project aims to develop a system that supports easy visualization of geoscience data regardless of its research field. We adopted "Google Earth", the virtual globe program provided by Google as the visualization platform. Google Earth uses a data format called KML (Keyhole Markup Language) to display data on it. We are developing KML generators that convert various geophysical and geochemical data to KML files.

Our current targets are seismic tomographic data, geochemcal data of rocks, geomagnetic field model data and data acquired by research vessels. We are planning to support other kinds of data.

"Vertical cross section of seismic tomographic model" + "isotopic data of rocks sampeld from Izu-Bonin-Mariana region (²⁰⁶Pb/²⁰⁴Pb(blue), ¹⁴³Nd/¹⁴⁴Nd(purpul), ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr(green))". Source KML files are created by our KML generators. The tomographic model clarifies three low seismic velocity regions which exist beneath three regions depicted by isotopic data. (see Isse et al., 2009, Earth & Planet. Sci. Lett. 278, 107-119).

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  "Vertical cross section of seismic tomographic model" + "isotopic data of rocks sampeld from Izu-Bonin-Mariana region"