Strength in numbers.

In the 1970s, the Geological Survey of Canada published a series of four correlation charts for the entire country. All rocks known at the time were included in a single, unifying body of knowledge. The American Association of Petroleum Geologists was impressed and launched COSUNA. These two ground-breaking initiatives serve as the starting point for Macrostrat North America. Building and improving on this superb starting point and creating COSUNA II is what this is all about.

Few other regions in the world have a greater density of highly-organized geoinformatics than New Zealand, all thanks to The Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences (GNS). Making sense of all that information might be tough, but P.R. King and colleagues brilliantly integrated two decades of stratigraphic work and analysis in their "Cretaceous to Recent sedimentary patterns in New Zealand." This unparalleled compilation is the rich starting point for Macrostrat New Zealand.

Few advances in geoscience have had a bigger impact than the three major offshore drilling initiatives (IODP, DSDP, ODP). Originally launched to find evidence for sea floor spreading, offshore drilling is now one of the major research tools for paleoclimatology, tectonics, and geophysics. Macrostrat Deep Sea aims to bring this body of knowledge together into an interactive, quantiative tool. Emphasis is now on sediments, but like all missions, that too will evolve.