EARTHSCOPE: OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES FOR EARTH SCIENTISTS

The EarthScope Initiative provides an integrating framework for investigating continental evolution, dynamics, and structure using the continental US as a natural laboratory. If successful, NSF MRE funding will provide new observational facilities to deliver seismic, GPS, strain, and borehole data that, for the first time, will allow Earth Scientists to observe plate tectonics in real-time on a continental scale. These new facilities will provide synoptic data at an order of magnitude higher resolution than currently available, providing the first continuous, coherent, high-resolution, three-dimensional images of the Earth’s interior, and allowing Earth scientists to link deep earth processes and structure to their surface expression on a continental scale. Undoubtedly these new facilities will improve our understanding of lithospheric and sublithospheric mantle composition and deformational processes. However, to maximize the potential for significant advances in our understanding of tectonic processes, observations from these new facilities must be integrated with additional geologic data sets of similar quality and resolution.

The integration, manipulation, and analysis of these combined data sets provide significant challenges for the Earth Science community. Data QC, access, retrieval, integration, and visualization tools need to be developed. Community models have provided a mechanism within the Atmospheric and Ocean Science disciplines for scientists to integrate, analyze, and share data and results within a process oriented framework. The Earth science community should consider the applicability of a similar approach and potential appropriate community models.

In addition to expanding research possibilities, EarthScope offers an unprecedented opportunity for Earth Scientists to engage the general public in the scientific enterprise, raising the profile of the Earth Sciences, and revealing the importance of Earth processes in shaping the environment in which we live.