Observations and measurements made by observatory OBSERA

The Earth surface evolves under the action of geological, chemical, physical, biological and anthropogenic processes involving a wide range of time and length scales (from the meter and the second up to the thousand of kilometers and the million years). These processes control the evolution of soils, the shape of landscapes and the coupling between climate, tectonics and erosion. Understanding them requires to monitor experimental catchments over durations long enough to capture all the time scales involved. The Observatory of Erosion in the Antilles (ObsErA) is a new observatory created in january 2011 by the CNRS-INSU to address these problematics. It is operated by the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP) and involves a team of 12 permanent technicians, engineers and researchers belonging to 3 different institutes: IPGP and the Observatoire Volcanologique et Sismologique de Guadeloupe (OVSG), the University of Bretagne Occidentale (UBO) and the Laboratoire des Sciences de la Terre de l’Université Lyon1 (LST).

The objectives of ObsErA are :

to study and quantify the chemical and physical erosion, their feedbacks and their influence on the geological cycle, the carbon cycle and the environment (soil development, rivers chemistry, etc. .. .) in the peculiar context of a tropical volcanic island,

to promote the development of new instruments and methods (including new isotopic tracers) for monitoring sediment transport by rivers and slope processes and characterizing the ecosystem dynamics.

to investigate how extreme events (floods induced by heavy rains and tropical storms, earthquakes, ...) may influence the long term denudation rate and the morphology of reliefs.

In this aim, ObsErA acquires data (river flow rates, suspended load, sediment size distributions in rivers, chemical composition of soils and rivers, precipitations,...) on 8 field sites belonging to 3 catchments located on Basse-Terre Island, a volcanic island of the Guadeloupe archipelago in the lesser Antilles arc.These data are made freely available to the scientific community on the ObsERA web site.

Citation proposal
. Observations and measurements made by observatory OBSERA. https://services.mspdata.eu:/geonetwork/srv/api/records/bbcfdf7d-99b3-490e-8ea1-522bf55d428a

Date ( Creation )

Date ( Publication )

Date ( Revision )

Identifier: http://portailrbvws.sedoo.fr/observatory/ / OBSERA

Status: On going On going

Principal investigator

Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris - Eric Lajeunesse

Point of contact

Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris - Eric Lajeunesse

Point of contact

Observatoire Volcanologique et Sismologique de Guadeloupe (OVSG) - Céline Dessert

Owner

Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris - Eric Lajeunesse

Owner

Observatoire Volcanologique et Sismologique de Guadeloupe (OVSG) - Céline Dessert

Access constraints: Other restrictions Other restrictions

Other constraints: Les données sont accessibles sans aucune restriction aux utilisateurs enregistrés sur la base de données d'ObsERA.

Use limitation

The data are accessible royalty free to the registered users of the ObsERA database. Downloading data requires an authentication of the user. Consequently, users have to apply for registration prior to be granted access to the

data base. Registration is performed through filling out an online form in which the applicant will specify his

identity and affiliation. ObsERA data are reserved for scientific activities, educational programs, or any other

activity serving the public interest. Their use for commercial activities whatsoever is prohibited. We kindly ask the authors of a publication using ObsERA data to formally acknowledge ObsERA.