A recent report by McKinsey Global Institute reports that there are 30 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook every month; that the US Library of Congress had collected 235 terabytes of data by April 2011 and that 15 out of 17 sectors in the US have more data stored per company than stored by the US Library of Congress. The future only sees this content increasing, with a projected growth of 40% in global data generated by commerce and individuals per year. In science, new fields are being born from, for example, the study of tweets, the acceleration pace of changes in previously quiescent ice sheets and earthquake prediction based on new observations. Genomics, radio astronomy and the search for fundamental particles at the Large Hadron Collider are producing many petabytes of data derived from advanced instruments.

Data are enabling new discoveries using what has become known as the fourth paradigm of scientific investigation. This presentation provides an overview of the diverse nature of the data driving the fourth paradigm with the data's richness of size, variety of characteristics and will touch on the impact it has on science and our lives. The deluge and its impact are pervasive.