About MSL

Why EPOS MSL?

In a world that demands increasing collaboration within the scientific community, solid Earth science laboratories are challenged with finding each other to exchange best practices and re-use data. Data produced by the EPOS Multi-Scale Laboratories are crucial to serving society’s needs for geo-resources exploration and for protection against geo-hazards. Indeed,

to model Earth system behavior during human or tectonic forcing

, we need to understand the governing processes and properties from the molecule scale to the scale of the operating system. Therefore, coordination and communication inside the European solid Earth science laboratories, complemented with services to increase curation and access for re-use of laboratory data is needed to effectively contribute to solve the grand challenges facing society.

What is EPOS MSL?

EPOS Multi-Scale Laboratories includes a wide range of world-class laboratories, aimed at studying the

properties and processes controlling rock system behaviour

. The length scales addressed by these infrastructures cover the nano- and micrometre levels (electron microscopy and micro-beam analysis) to the scale of experiments on centimetre and decimetre sized samples, to analogue model experiments simulating the reservoir scale, the basin scale and the plate scale.

What does EPOS MSL do?

EPOS MSL collects and harmonizes available and emerging laboratory (meta)data, aiming to generate data products that are easily Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable (FAIR) for future research, notably into Geo-resources, Geo-storage, Geo-hazards and Earth System Evolution. Data emerging from MSL labs can be categorized as below, following the six major sub-domains below.