IMPORTANCE OF FIELD SCHOOLS AND INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION IN ACTIVE FAULT STUDIES

Despite impressive improvement in technology applied to active-faulting studies, a critical limit to progress in characterizing active faults and applying that understanding to seismic-hazard mitigation is the ability to determine structural and recurrence behavior, once a fault’s activity is recognized, and to extrapolate that understanding to other faults and general fault behavior in hazard models. The growing ease of collecting surface (and esp. topographic) data remotely has reduced the collection of (and perceived need for) stratigraphic and subsurface 3d structural data critical to really understanding faulting and the geologic processes that preserve and modify the record of past activity. Trenching to expose the shallow subsurface and detailed geologic mapping are critical to integrating that information with the burgeoning surface data and comparison with many other examples is required to generalize the understanding into useful hazard inputs. Detailed on-the-ground mapping and trenching is extremely time consuming, requires often difficult-to-obtain permission for access, and is labor and financially expensive. International collaboration, to expand the number and variety of sites we can understand, and field schools, to provide the labor, access to sites, and training of new geologists to carry out these studies, address this need. I will present examples of field schools that trained and stimulated students, developed international friendships and collaboration, led to useful research results on active faults and generated practical contributions to hazard mitigation in Oregon, California, Kyrgyzstan, Thailand, and Myanmar.