Tephrabase GIS and Tephrostratigraphy

Introduction

This is the homepage of Tephrabase GIS and Tephrostratigraphy, an extension to Tephrabase where a set of academic-research oriented web-based GIS and profile tools can be found. These were originally developed by Dale Cameron (2011), for his MSc Geographical Information Science dissertation at the University of Edinburgh in 2011. The current system is based on Dale's excellent work.

Initially the data used in this extension was from Richard Streeter's 2012 PhD thesis (Streeter, 2012) and further details can be found in Streeter and Dugmore (2014). Now the Sediment Accumulation Rate Calculator has been extended to cover other Icelandic sites. Also, the Tephrostratigraphic Profile Generator is available for different sites accross Europe. Other suitable data will be linked into this system in the future.

Products

These tools are still under development and will be available from this page. Tephrostratigraphic Profile and Sediment Accumuolation Rate generators are the first on to go live.

The following tools are under development, although there are issues with interpolating such data in a meaningful way:

  • Tephra Layer Thickness Contour Plot & Point Shapefile Generator
  • Sediment Accumulation Contour Plot & Point Shapefile Generator
  • Paleo-Topography Contour Plot & Point Shapefile Generator
Tephrostratigraphy example

References

Cameron, D. (2011) Tephra profiles and time: A four-dimensional extension to Tephrabase. The University of Edinburgh, Unpublished MSc Dissertation. 165 pp. More details available here.

Streeter, R. (2012) Tephrochronology, landscape and population: impacts of plague on medieval Iceland. The University of Edinburgh, Unpublished PhD Thesis. 244 pp. Access here.

Streeter, R. and Dugmore, A. (2014) Late-Holocene land surface change in a coupled social ecological system, southern Iceland: a cross-scale tephrochronology approach. Quaternary Science Reviews 86, 99-114. doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2013.12.016.