BEyOND, A NEW TOOL FOR SAPROPEL S1 STUDIES IN THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA

Abstract

Science advances and, with it, the storage of large amounts of data. The need to use this data efficiently, quickly and safely is possible thanks to the Big Data Analytics (BDA) that allows us to store and relate data in order to obtain new knowledge. In this paper we present and explain how we constructed the new database, “BEyOND”, that provides a wide variety of organized and standardized paleoproxies relative to the past 20.000 years of Mediterranean Sea history. BEyOND makes available to all researchers the possibility to extract and analyze data. We focused on a specific interval of time corresponding to the deposition of the most recent sapropel (S1) and the potential uses offered by the tool. BEyOND contains 126 sediment cores data from 79 scientific papers and a total of 1.678 different proxy related data that have been categorized in: geochemistry, isotopes, pollen, sediment grain size, coccolithophore, dinoflagellate and foraminifera. Our work highlights the development of a new methodology to correlate data, including the cases where data regarding the precise age control for each core was missing. It highlights as well the potential of using data analytics to extract hidden patterns and new knowledge also in the field of paleoceanography.