Proposal for EarthScope Pre-meeting Workshop Support: Leveraging USArray - Opportunities for Onshore/Offshore Experiments and USArray and EarthScope Science in Alaska

Oregon State University, Corvallis OR

Investigators

Abstract

EarthScope Pre-meeting Workshop Support: "Leveraging USArray: Opportunities for Onshore/Offshore Experiments" Workshop Organizers: Dayanthie S. Weeraratne (California State University, Northridge) Anne M. Trehu (Oregon State University) "USArray and EarthScope Science in Alaska" Workshop Organizers: Jeff Freymueller and Doug Christensen (both at University of Alaska Fairbanks) Two pre-meeting workshops prior to the 2009 EarthScope National Meeting are focused on "Leveraging USArray: Opportunities for Onshore/Offshore Experiments" and on "USArray and EarthScope Science in Alaska." These workshops are being held on the morning and afternoon of May 12, 2009, respectively, and workshop reports will be posted on the EarthScope web site. Potential contributions of offshore seismic instrumentation towards achieving Earthscope objectives at the edges of North America are discussed during the morning workshop. The objectives are to identify scientific goals that can be uniquely addressed on the continental margins of North America and discuss instrumentation needs for achieving these goals. The afternoon workshop focuses on EarthScope scientific targets in Alaska, in preparation for the arrival of USArray in Alaska. Among the objectives are to update and refine scientific goals of EarthScope in Alaska, seed new interdisciplinary collaborations and provide information to IRIS so that logistical and operational decisions for USArray deployment are informed by scientific needs. There is strong synergy between these two workshops as Alaska is one of the three regions targeted by the onshore/offshore group, and any discussion of scientific targets in the coastal regions of Alaska should consider how offshore data have the potential to contribute towards achieving scientific goals. This synergy is reflected in the large fraction of participants attending both workshops.