German Marine Seismic Data Access

Reflection seismic data are the prime source of information for the subsurface structure as they provide the highest resolution of any geophysical technique. As such they have been used for a large variety of academic and commercial purposes. For many decades reflection seismic data were the largest data sets in Earth sciences, which created significant storage and archival problems and until today there is no international, European, or German data portal that is used throughout the community. Within this pilot project, we have started to develop a unifying data infrastructure, to kick off data archeology for existing data, and to prepare for future archival of reflection seismic data from future research cruises. The initiative serves primarily Germany’s marine geophysics community as represented by the working group Marine Geophysics AGMAR, but it is closely aligned with similar initiatives in the U.S. and Italy. The pilot for reflection seismic data contributes to the efforts of NFDI₄Earth to establish a distributed infrastructure for data curation by harmonized data workflows with connections to international data repositories.