The workshop on "Geodynamics of the Lithosphere and Deep Earth" (GLADE), held July 26-29, 2010 at Scripps Institution of Oceanography aims to bring the largely fragmented lithosphere and mantle dynamics researchers out of the ?forest? and into an open forum to begin discussing major scientific questions together as a community and address the challenges those provide. GLADE is intended to serve as a nesting ground for the US Geodynamics community to present and discuss both state-of-the-art and emerging research directions.
With the view that computational geodynamics has moved into the realm of predictive capability, this highly technical discipline needs a venue for in-depth and specialized discussion in order that we may learn from each other. However, the geodynamics community also recognizes the essential role that observations have in developing and constraining geodynamic models, in particular those coming from areas such as tectonics, plate reconstructions, and rheology of Earth materials. Towards this goal, the meeting strongly encourages participation from the tectonics community and aims to foster meaningful and continual engagement between the geodynamics and tectonics communities.
The content of the GLADE meeting will be focused upon ma jor outstanding scientific issues that transcend solid Earth geodynamics and related topics in planetary evolution and dynamics. The scientific content is spread over the first three days of the meeting, while the final day will be set aside for tutorials and technical workshops on geodynamics software. These demonstrations and tutorials are intended to emphasize next-generation geodynamics software and community-supported advances to existing software, much of which has been championed and maintained by the Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics (CIG). All graduate students in attendance will be required to participate in the technical program, but other (senior) participants may leave after the scientific program. The meeting adopts a novel format that seeks to better integrate poster, oral, and discussion sessions, as well as designate time for students to meet with keynote speakers. In addition, the CIG steering committee will host a townhall discussion on the first evening of the meeting in order to gain input from the community regarding past and future software development priorities.
This effort is supported by the Geophysics, Tectonics, and Marine Geology & Geophysics Programs.
. This workshop was host to 90 participants from 9 countries (with about 30% international participation) and about 50% of attendees were either current or recently graduated PhD students. The scientific program included 3 days of keynote lectures by prominant scientists in the fields of geodynamics and tectonics, as well as several poster sessions in which all attendees were able to share and interact with one another. Many of the topics covered related to the long term thermal and tectonic evolution of the solid Earth, including the nature of plate tectonics. A particular focus of the meeting was to bridge three diverse yet complementary scientific communities: 1) mantle dynamics, 2) lithospheric dynamics, and 3) tectonics, for which there is presently no such meeting held in the US that provides a venue for these communities to meet. This meeting helped bring together scientists that are involved in measuring motions of tectonic plates and their boundaries with those involved in modeling processes of plate tectonics with computer simulation. All junior scientists attended a technical program on the 4th day which included a variety of workshops that introduced and provided training with relevant research tools. Another major outcomes of this project is that many junior scientists were provided an educational opportunity to engage cutting edge research at the boundary between several disciplines. Finally, the Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics (CIG) steering committee held a townhall discussion in order to gain input from the community regarding past and future software development priorities.
