Tracking Orogenic Origins: collaborative research in the Himalaya

It is an honor and a pleasure to be a recipient of the GSA James B. Thompson, Jr., Distinguished International Lecturer award, especially after having taken classes from him in the 1980’s. His love and passion for understanding the chemical processes that drive mineral reactions contributed greatly to the knowledge of metamorphic processes that are key to one of the tools used to understand mountain building processes. The presence of mountain belts around the world controls global and local climate, as well as water storage and distribution. These factors are critical to life on this planet. For this reason, people have been investigating the formation of the world’s mountain belts for centuries. It is now clear that gaining this knowledge requires collaborative efforts from scientists across disciplines and from a diversity of backgrounds. The most impressive and long-lived mountain belts have formed from the collision of continents and the Himalaya is a modern example of such a process. To date researchers from around the world and across all earth science disciplines have contributed to our current understanding of how the Himalaya formed. For the J.B. Thompson, Jr. lecture tour, I plan to visit the countries of Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Japan with possible additions of Bhutan, Cambodia, or Vietnam to talk about collisional processes, the formation of the Himalaya, and the value of collaborative work and local knowledge in that process.