Tephra Workshop 2020

This workshop will bring together an international community of experts from multiple disciplines to take action on the outcomes and recommendations from Tephra workshops in 2014 and 2017, and seed the implementation and use of cyber based tools and technologies in tephra studies. Tephra studies relate a unique volcanic product that helps researchers to understand volcanic behavior, past eruptions, and the effects of volcanoes on climate and the environment. They provide time markers for geologic and prehistoric human events. The workshop and follow on activities will be useful to provide information for paleoclimatologists, archeologists and others who study environmental change and its impacts on society, and will provide tools for consistent evaluation of tephra layers, which are used extensively to date climatological and environmental transitions. The Broader Impacts of these efforts include the increased information access to a broad scientific community, and collaboration and communication between diverse researchers. The 50 researchers will include participants from under-represented groups in the geosciences. The researchers intend to hold a series of focused, international tephra workshops in 2019 to 2021.The goals are to produce: (1) publication of a consensus paper to draw attention to the demand, and to develop a coordination plan for creating comparable datasets across disciplines, (2) multiple open access products, for example, best practice templates, data collection and processing templates with end-user oriented minimum sets of required data, and (3) collation of databases and already built tools/code/software for data processing. These products are linked to future directions for the communities interested in tephra. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.