This award supports cooperative research on seismic imaging and Ocean Drilling Program ground truthing between Australian Geological Survey Organization researchers and Mike Coffin and post-doc Tadeusz Gladczenko from the University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics. This project is supplementary to work funded under OCE 9714368.
The Kerguelen Plateau in the southern Indian Ocean and the Ontong Java Plateau in the western Pacific ocean are the two largest flood basalt provinces known on Earth, each being approximately one-third the size of the contiguous United States. Through focused geophysical and scientific drilling programs on each, the PIs are attempting to understand better the mantle processes responsible for their formation, their volcanic and plutonic histories, and their relationships to global environmental and biotic change. Multichannel seismic reflection work on the Kerguelen and Onton Java plateaus, followed by scientific drilling of the two features are attempting to address the outstanding scientific problems.
The work plan involves a three-month collaboration with scientists at the Australian Geological Survey organization, which has multichannel seismic profiles of the majority of the eleven ODP sites on the Kerguelen Plateau. While these data are typically available only for purchase, through the collaborative project the U.S. PI and post-doc will have access to the data and to associated geophysical data which will be analyzed and published providing important access to key data to the scientific community in the process.
