At present many companies have their own internal, proprietary databases, but as far as we know there is no public database available to all geophysicists and other earth scientists. Further, much of the data and expertise in the oil/gas industry is in danger of being lost. We believe that it is vital to archive these data, as well as other published data, in a common, freely-available archive. We propose to build such an archive and distribute it over the WWW (as well as by CD-ROM), using as models other WEB-based geophysical/geological data servers. We believe that COMMON GROUND would be of invaluable service to the earth science community.