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Subduction Zone Observatory Workshop

Boise Centre
Boise Idaho, United States
29 - 01 September 2016

Deadlines Abstract submission: The abstract submission deadline has passed Registration: Registration is now closed Official website https://www.iris.edu/hq/workshops/2016/09/szo 16

The Subduction Zone Observatory (SZO) concept is a multidisciplinary science program to study a significant portion of one or more subduction zones as an integrated system. Subduction zones contain a rich diversity of tectonic processes operating at a wide range of temporal and spatial scales, from plate-scale over millions of years to grain-scale over microseconds. Subduction zones span continental to oceanic environments, and interact with biological processes and climate. Subduction zones are responsible for many of Earth's most extreme natural events including earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis. These hazards coupled with increasing population density in these regions leads to an urgent need to understand how subduction zones work to better inform hazard assessment, mitigation, forecasting, and early warning. Emerging technologies, strong international partnerships, open access data, and the success of long-term community experiments establish a strong foundation to investigate the entire subduction zone system from an integrated, multidisciplinary perspective and at multiple scales.

A comprehensive suite of multidisciplinary onshore and offshore observations at a Subduction Zone Observatory (SZO) will enable a systems approach to the complex, interconnected suite of physical and chemical processes operating at subduction zones. An SZO will improve our understanding of natural hazards including earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. Observations acquired through an SZO will address a number of grand challenges in geoscience, including fluid flux through the crust and mantle, geochemical processes in arcs, magmatism and volcanic eruptions, injection of water into the mantle, links between deep Earth and surface processes, lithospheric deformation, the earthquake cycle, and responses to megathrust earthquakes on times scales from seconds to millions of years and spatial scales from millimeters to thousands of kilometers.

The purpose of the workshop is to seek input and start defining what suite of activities would be involved in an SZO that allow new science to be achieved.