The trans-disciplinary and community-driven subduction zone initiation (SZI) database
- 1University College London, Earth Sciences, Harrow, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (kiran.chotalia.11@ucl.ac.uk)
- 2School of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom
- 3Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics (CEED), University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
- 4Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
- 5School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia,
- 6Department of Geology and Geophysics, Yale University, New Haven, USA
- 7Department of Earth Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands
- 8Bavarian Geoinstitute, University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany
Numerous studies have provided insights into one of the key problems of the Earth Sciences: subduction zone initiation (SZI). The insights into SZI are both numerous and diverse with evidence from multiple disciplines in Earth Sciences. SZI studies exploit the geological record, reconstruct regional or global plate motion back in time, interpret seismic tomography to identify the tip depth of sunken plate portions, and diagnose theoretical and numerical models of rock and plate deformation based on known physics.
Getting and keeping an overview over the many discipline-specific advances is challenging for many reasons: one being the dispersed sources of information, another being the missing communication across the individual disciplines. The latter shortcoming also arises from the multiple incompatible scientific jargons currently in use.
The SZI database now unifies the scientific jargon, and brings together old and new insights relating to SZI into a common, community-wide platform online (www.SZIdatabase.org). The SZI database builds bridges between individual communities, opening a community-wide discussion by making SZI data readily available and understandable. This keeps data and knowledge up-to-date, and can therefore provide the most complete picture of our current understanding of SZI.
In this presentation, we outline where to find, how to use, and why to contribute to the SZI database. This community-wide project has already yielded interesting results regarding the fascinating question about how and where SZI occurs on present-day Earth and back to around 100 Ma. Work thus far suggests ‘subduction breeds subduction’, highlighting the beginning of crucial insights from these ongoing cross-disciplinary efforts.
How to cite: Chotalia, K., Cooper, G., Crameri, F., Domeier, M., Eakin, C., Grima, A. G., Gürer, D., Király, Á., Magni, V., Mulyukova, E., Peters, K., Robert, B., Shephard, G., and Thielmann, M.: The trans-disciplinary and community-driven subduction zone initiation (SZI) database, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-15910, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-15910, 2020.
