The Concept
Scientific Landscape
European Earth scientists have played a major role in the study of plate tectonics during the past 50 years making great advances, opening new horizons and creating a framework to explain, to first order, plate dynamics and to model deformation processes. European research and monitoring infrastructures have also gathered, largely on national scales, a vast amount of geological and geophysical data. These have been used by research networks to improve our models describing the active deformation processes that generate earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides and tsunamis. Since the 1970s and the 80s (establishment of data centres like ORFEUS and EMSC) there have been European scale initiatives to integrate the existing national research infrastructures in solid Earth science to facilitate the exchange of data, information, modelling and monitoring tools. EPOS is timely in integrating these mature initiatives into a single infrastructure enabling Earth scientists across Europe to combine, model and interpret multidisciplinary datasets at different scales. The concepts embodied in EPOS are vital to maintain European scientific competitiveness on the international stage.
Meeting the integration challenges
Integrating Earth science infrastructures in Europe presents a double challenge - firstly, a highly heterogeneous geographical pattern of both observational and experimental multidisciplinary data must be integrated to facilitate complex analysis and modelling. Secondly, e-infrastructures and e-science must be developed to support the EPOS construction. The Earth science community is well-placed to address these challenges as we have significant experience in coordinating and adopting format standards for data exchange in the global geophysical community, in seismology in particular, and we are well placed in international initiatives. Long term experience in governance of a widely distributed community has been obtained for example in seismology through NGOs like ORFEUS (since 1987) and EMSC (since 1975).
User groups: training the new generation
EPOS will be an open access infrastructure. Several thousand researchers in the Earth sciences will benefit from the services provided and this will foster major advances in the understanding of the dynamic processes occurring in the Earth. EPOS is aimed at serving as primary source of data and tools for creative young researchers whose scientific discoveries will point the way to improve the infrastructure itself and the level of the service provided. To reach such an objective and contribute to the creation of a new work and scientific environment that empowers all researchers regardless of their physical location, a coherent training programme for the user community is needed to ensure that the beneficiaries will be able to exploit the full potential of the integrated research infrastructure and the e-science facility incorporated. To this end, EPOS will also start a competitive fellowship programme dedicated to young researchers. EPOS is aimed at a broad user community including European and Mediterranean countries. Promoting the participation of other countries will further enlarge the initial pan-European composition of EPOS. However, because the development of EPOS is a result of previous and ongoing EC projects (such as NERIES, EXPLORIS, SPICE, MERA and Quest) with input from European scientific organizations (such as ORFEUS and EMSC), the user community has already strongly contributed and influenced the design of this proposal. Furthermore, access to geophysical and geological data will be attractive for both European and international scientists. It is expected that EPOS will have an impact also on other scientific fields because of its multidisciplinary nature.
Timely initiative EPOS is a timely initiative responding to the current European need for a comprehensive and integrated solid Earth RI. The European solid Earth science community is well prepared for the task. EPOS will be the currently lacking solid Earth science component complementing other large scale RI studying the planet Earth in the GEO(SS) initiative (see Figure below). The ESA satellite and EMSO ocean observing systems are examples.
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