This proposal requests funds to help support travel and meeting costs for students and early career scientists at U.S. institutions to the 27th International Conference on Mathematical Geophysics ?Dynamics in Earth Systems: Flow, Fracture, and Waves? to be held in June 15-20, 2008 in Longyearbyen, Norway, on the Spitsbergen Island of the Svalbard Archipelago. The conference website is www.fys.uio.no/cmg2008/.
This conference brings together Earth scientists from across the disciplines with physicists, applied mathematicians, and computational scientists to discuss advances in mathematical and computational techniques for understanding properties and processes in the Earth. This year?s meeting emphasizes aspects of the solid and fluid earth in which the dynamics is regulated by wave propagation and breaking, stress accumulation and fracture. Those include flow and fracture of ice sheets, slips in faults and generation of earthquakes, transport in geophysical turbulent flows and porous media, dynamics of avalanches. This meeting provides a single multi-disciplinary forum for the exchange of ideas and techniques across the disciplinary boundaries in the Earth Sciences. Funds are requested to support travel and lodging costs for 15 students, post-docs, and early career scientists which is approximately one third of the number attending past meetings.
This meting is highly interdisciplinary and international in nature and provides an important opportunity for U.S. students and early career scientists from across the earth sciences and applied mathematics to interact with senior scientists in a small informal setting. This year there will also be an increased emphasis on mathematical aspects of the dynamics of fracture, which can have sudden and destructive consequences, as in the breaking of ice sheets (recently recognized of crucial importance for climate studies and sea level rise predictions, given the unexpected observed acceleration of mass loss from the ice sheets) and in the generation of earthquakes.
