Speaker
Description
The European Plate Observing System (EPOS) is a European research infrastructure designed to integrate geophysical observations, data services, and scientific communities into a unified framework for solid Earth science. Through its Thematic Core Services (TCS), EPOS provides access to interoperable datasets across domains such as seismology, geodesy, volcanology, and geological data. The purpose of EPOS is to enable multidisciplinary research by harmonising data access, improving interoperability, and supporting the integration of diverse observational Earth data types within a common platform.
Muon imaging, or muography, has been deployed across a wide range of geoscientific fields, including volcanology, glaciology, mineral exploration, and environmental studies. Its ability to provide direct information on subsurface density structures makes it a valuable complementary technique to existing geophysical methods. Despite these advances, muography and related muon-based technologies remain relatively underrecognised within the broader geoscientific community. This creates both a challenge and an opportunity to better connect muography with established Earth observation frameworks such as EPOS and its TCSs.
Within the Horizon Europe EPOS ON project (doi:10.3030/101131592), initial steps are being taken to engage the muography community and explore pathways for sharing observational data with the EPOS platform. A key challenge identified is the lack of standardised data formats and metadata for muography. In the Horizon Europe‑funded EPOS ON project, integration work—led by the University of Oulu and supported by the HUN‑REN Wigner Research Centre for Physics, which is not a project partner—has begun through volcanological use cases in collaboration with the EPOS TCS for Volcanology. These developments highlight a pathway for muography to evolve from a specialised technique into a recognised observational data type within the geoscientific community.
EPOS provides a pathway for muography to evolve into a recognised observational data type within the geoscientific community.