DataONE - The Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE) is poised to be the foundation of innovative environmental science through a distributed framework and sustainable cyberinfrastructure that are open, persistent, robust, and secure access to well-described and easily discovered Earth observational data. Supported by the NSF, DataONE will ensure preservation and access to multi-scale, multi-discipline, and multi-national science data across domain boundaries. DataONE will make biological data available from the genome to the ecosystem; make environmental data available from atmospheric, ecological, hydrological, and oceanographic sources; provide secure and long-term preservation and access; and engage scientists, land-managers, policy makers, students, educators, and the public through logical access and intuitive visualizations. Most importantly, DataONE is not an end but a means to serve a broader range of science domains both directly and through interoperability with the DataONE distributed network.

dbSEABED - marine substrate information from seafloor surveys is unified in this source, which can import into your GIS or relational database.

Discovering Antarctica - An outreach site from the Royal Geographical Society in partnership with the British Antarctic Survey and U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Multimedia and interactive activities engage visitors in exploring the physical, biological, and human story of the Antarctic continent. Topics are organized in non-traditional but logical ways. Winner of the Geoscience Information Society Best Website Award for 2009.

GeoCommunicator - from the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service, well-organized access to land and mineral use records, a map server showing public lands, Public Land Survey System (PLSS) and other survey-based data, and reference documents on cadastral survey and land records.

Geodata.gov - the portal for GIS and spatial data from the U.S. government. Includes GIS for the Nation, the National Map, geographic names, and data in categories such as geological and geophysical, atmosphere and climatic, biology and ecology, and environment and conservation.

Geologic Atlas of the United States - TIFF images of 227 USGS map folios, produced between 1894 and 1945, with topographic and geologic maps. The maps cover selected areas of the United States, including Colorado's Engineer Mountain, Needle Mountains, Spanish Peaks, and Colorado Springs. The images take about 10-15 minutes to load but are publication-quality when they do (no low-rez PDFs here).

Global Change Master Directory - a clearinghouse of earth science data. Browse by topic (atmosphere, biosphere, climate indicators, cryosphere, human dimensions, hydrosphere, paleoclimate, etc.), data centers, locations, instruments, platforms, or projects.

Global Runoff Data Center - the worldwide repository of discharge data and associated metadata, focusing on global river discharge data for the sake of research linking global and local change issues. Operates under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) with the support of the Federal Institute of Hydrology, Germany.

Integrated Ocean Drilling Program - sponsored by funding agencies in the United States, Europe, and Japan, this program conducts basic research into the history of the ocean basins and the nature of the crust below the seafloor.

International Polar Year - maintained by the NSF, this portal is the official gateway to all things U.S. and IPY, including participating U.S. agencies and organizations, opportunities for researchers, classroom resources, and galleries.

International Tree-Ring Data Bank - maintained by the NOAA Paleoclimatology Program and World Data Center for Paleoclimatology, this data bank includes raw ring width or wood density measurements and site chronologies for more than 2000 sites on six continents.

Landsat GeoCover - Landsat remote sensing data from NASA for all land surfaces of the globe, in .sid file format, suitable for GIS projects and use as background images. For the same data in .tif format, one file per band, that is suitable for spectral analysis, go to the Global Land Cover Facility at the University of Maryland.

Mineral Database from mindat.org - data on minerals worldwide, which you can search by properties, chemical composition, mineral association, or geographic location. The entry for each mineral includes physical and chemical properties, type occurences, crystallography, optical and x-ray powder diffraction data, and related minerals.

Multi-language Glossary of Permafrost and Related Ground-Ice Terms - Revised in 2005, this permafrost glossary from NSIDC/World Data Center for Glaciology has terms in Chinese, English, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

National Archive of Marine Seismic Surveys - historic 2D and 3D seismic data covering offshore Alaska, California, and portions of the west coast. ChevronTexaco Corp. donated the data to the AGI in March 2005; the USGS and AGI are partnering in converting the data from magnetic tapes. The data are useful for understanding offshore structural geology, marine sedimentation, and fault systems.

National Climatic Data Center - NOAA - the world's largest active archive of weather data.

National Environmental Data Index - NOAA's growing index of environmental data and metadata from several federal government agencies.

National Geophysical Data Center - NOAA - more than 300 databases describing the solid earth, marine, and solar-terrestrial environments.

National Oceanographic Data Center - NOAA - global marine and coastal data, including climatic atlases, zooplankton time series, and History of the Arctic Exploration 2003: Cruise Reports, Data.

National Snow and Ice Data Center Data Catalog - data sets from many investigators, including data held in the Antarctic Glaciological Data Center (AGDC), ARCSS, Frozen Ground Catalog, NOAA, and World Data Center for Glaciology. Also special collections, such as Glaciers Long-Term Change Photograph Pairs, which match photographs of glaciers taken as early as the 1890s with recent photos taken from the same physical locations.

Niwot Ridge Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) data - includes archived raw data.

On the Cutting Edge - this professional development resource helps keep geoscience faculty up-to-date on both Earth science research and teaching methods. A project of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers and the Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College, this useful site with clear navigation works new discoveries and research fairly quickly into
classroom settings.

RealClimate blog - a commentary site on climate science that provides a quick response and missing context to developing media stories.

Seismic data on interactive map servers for the world, California, and Iceland.

Digital Data

The Information Center has several data sources on CD to support general research, including: