A meeting in Boise sponsored by the National Science Foundation will draw roughly 250 scientists from a range of disciplines and countries. The Subduction Zone Observatory meeting will be held Sept. 29-Oct. 1 at the Boise Centre.
“Having the meeting here in Boise is a great opportunity to showcase our community and the ongoing research at Boise State to a broad, international and multi-disciplinary group of researchers,” said Lee Liberty, a research professor in the Department of Geosciences, who helped organize the event.
Jeffrey Johnson, associate professor of geosciences, will present a vision statement on volcano observatories and a number of other Boise State faculty and students also will participate.
The purpose of the workshop is to seek input and start defining what suite of activities would be involved in a Subduction Zone Observatory (SZO) that allow new science to be achieved. The SZO concept is a multidisciplinary science program to study a significant portion of one or more subduction zones as an integrated system. The group’s first task is to set priorities for the SZO, with a main focus being hazards such as earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes.
Subduction zones comprise environments ranging from dry land to deep sea, interacting with biological processes and climate. They are responsible for many of Earth’s most extreme natural events. Coupled with increasing population density, these hazards lead 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.
BY: KATHLEEN TUCK PUBLISHED 8:18 AM / SEPTEMBER 27, 2016