EarthScope and associated activities will provide a wealth of data from a wide range of disciplines about how Earth.s crust deforms on a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Interpreting these data in terms of the underlying processes requires model-based inference. In order to gain better understanding of earth processes, as well as to address adequately the high quality data that are increasingly becoming available from geodesy, paleoseismology, stress measurements, and seismology, it is crucial that substantial effort be devoted to improving our models. While in the short term (important for siting of instruments, and guiding development of more sophisticated approaches), we can make significant progress with relatively simple models; ultimately a large-scale computational effort is needed in order to do justice to the data. We plan a three-day workshop at Los Alamos, Aug. 16-19, 2004, with formal discussion periods, but also with significant time to conduct hands-on work. The main objective will be to address the issues relating to meshing complex geologic problems. This workshop is open to all interested members of the EarthScope modeling community; by holding it at LANL, we can take advantage of local expertise in meshing and solving large FEM problems.
