MARGINS GEO-CYBEREDUCATION ABOUT THE SUBDUCTION FACTORY

The NSF's MARGINS program was developed to promote new research strategies for the interdisciplinary study of the vast and complex continental margins. The program focuses on four fundamental initiatives, one of which is the Subduction Factory (SubFac) initiative. The SubFac initiative has two focus sites: the Central American (CentAm) and the Izu-Bonin-Mariana (IBM) arc systems. The three fundamental questions postulated by the Subduction Factory experiment are: • How do forcing functions such as convergence rate and upper plate thickness regulate production of magma and fluid from the Subduction Factory? • How does the volatile cycle (H2O and CO2) impact chemical physical and biological processes from trench to deep mantle? • What is the mass balance of chemical species and material across the Subduction Factory, and how does this balance affect continental growth and evolution? The Collaborative Research: Synthesis and Integration of Magmagenetic Controls for Subduction Factory focus sites (SubFacSIP) is a 3-year collaborative effort between five U.S. scientists, two U.S. graduate students, and two Japanese scientists. SubFacSIP was developed in response to calls from the 2004 MARGINS Review Committee for synthesis and integration of results collected over the last decade as a result of the NSF MARGINS program. SubFacSIP will synthesize and compare the geochemistry of the CentAm and IBM focus sites. The SubFacSIP is organized into three phases. Phase I, the Database Effort, is the collection and filtering of all geochemical data collected in the focus sites since 1970, using the EarthChem and GANSEKI data portals. During phase II, the Synthesis and Development Effort, the filtered data collected during phase I, will be processed and modeled using the Arc Basalt Simulator (ABS) software (KIMURA et al., 2009) to identify and compare the most important processes controlling the composition of IBM and Central American arc lavas. Phase III, the Science Education Effort, focuses on training geoscience educators and students in the use of the SubFac database and ABS software to explore convergent margin magma generation. This presentation will discuss the present state of our effort and show some new results.