Macrostrat and the 'digital crust'

Daven Quinn is a research scientist at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. A structural geologist by training, he has become a leader in the emerging field of geoinformatics, working to model the Earth's crust as a complete, integrated system. He leads the development of geological software including Macrostrat, a digital model of Earth's geologic framework; Rockd, a collaborative field guide; and Mapboard GIS, an iPad app for geologic mapping.

Over the past two decades, macrostratigraphy, a quantitative approach to the geological record, has led to new insights into the Earth-life system. It also motivated the development of Macrostrat, a unique database that links geologic maps and stratigraphic columns into a unified representation of Earth's crustal framework. Macrostrat’s data structures provide a scaffold to contextualize other datasets (e.g., fossil occurrences and geochemical measurements) within the rocks they describe, and open data services support a variety of uses beyond research, most prominently including the community-oriented Rockd app. Macrostrat is now being adapted to capture geological relationships at multiple scales, to address research areas ranging from basin-scale stratigraphic correlation to mineral-systems modeling.

A central vision in geoinformatics is the development of multi-scale, multi-modal descriptive geological models structured to align with modern computational approaches. Such "whole-system" models could greatly accelerate geological research, much as global circulation models have in atmospheric science or in silico cell models in biology. Top-down efforts to build world-scale geologic models have had limited impact; long-term success will require purposeful collaboration across geoscience subfields, human-centered software design, fluid data sharing, and new architectures for encoding geologic insights. A Macrostrat-like framework for connecting geological knowledge is one of many elements needed to make this “digital crust" a reality.