GEOLOGICAL RESEARCH ON OCEAN MARGINS: TRENDS AND POSSIBILITIES

Following an attempt to identify existing trends and envisage future promise through several public fora, the marine geological community in the US has offered their vision of the future of marine geosciences. Some themes common to all subdisciplines have emerged, that include, the societal imperative of making rapid progress in the understanding of complicated non-linear systems; the central role played by focused fluids in producing volcanic, tectonic and thermal modification of our planet; the recognition that present-day conditions may not be representative of the whole of the geological history; the importance of explicit interaction of the biosphere with the geosphere; and the appreciation that we must move beyond the steady-state models to study geological events as they happen.

The deliberations also focused on the important questions that need to be resolved by the marine geological community on the convergent and passive margins given the realization that ocean margins evolve through a complex interaction of mechanical, chemical, biological and fluid processes. These processes over time accumulate most of the Earth’s valuable resources. Also, most of the world’s principal geological hazards converge at the margins, the site of the greatest population density. To understand the evolution of the continental margins several broad processes need first to be understood: the deformation of the lithosphere and strain partitioning within the crust and upper mantle; heat and mass transfer associated with subduction that lead to production of magma and the role of fluid flow on this system; the relationships between small-scale physical events and the formation of longer-term sedimentary record; and the role of fluid circulation through sediments and igneous rocks at active and passive margins.

The results of these deliberations, steps undertaken in the US to realize these research goals in collaboration with the international scientific community and the important role that the next phase of Ocean Drilling (the IODP) will play in the ocean margins research will be highlighted during this presentation.