This CAREER project integrates research and education to investigate Himalayan tectonics using bedrock cooling ages and the sedimentary record downstream of the Eastern Himalayan Syntaxis. At the margins of the India-Asia collision zone, Himalayan topography curves around the corners of the Indian plate defining great bends or syntaxes that represent roughly a third of the highest active mountain range on Earth. At the Eastern Syntaxis, rock exhumation has been extremely rapid and localized for at least the last 3 million years, contributing disproportionately to the sediment flux of the great Brahmaputra river system and Bengal Fan downstream. Determining when rapid exhumation initiated and how focused it has been through time are key to understanding this localization of deformation in Earth?s crust. However, constraints based on bedrock data are limited to the last few million years and do not extend south of the syntaxis, precisely where some structural models predict rapid exhumation. This project will document the regional exhumation pattern, relating cooling ages of bedrock and modern river sediments to the area?s structural evolution, and extend the exhumation record through time by targeting sediments shed from the mountains in the past 50 million years that are now preserved in basins of northeast India and the Bengal Fan. The results will represent a fundamental new step towards addressing two broad Earth Science questions: 1) Over what time and spatial scales do processes linking erosion and the structural evolution of mountain belts operate? and 2) How does variability in sediments reflect these processes?
Research and education will be integrated through inquiry-based teaching, professional development for high school teachers, and outreach in primarily minority-serving schools. Active learning methodologies and web resources will engage university students in a series of courses grounded in educational research, which challenge participants to develop original research proposals pertaining to Himalayan tectonics. Targeting high-achieving high school students has been demonstrated as an effective means to improve participation of underrepresented minorities in science. To implement this strategy, the principal investigator will mentor and train 10 high school teachers to offer introductory Earth Science for college credit in socio-economically disadvantaged minority serving high schools. Research findings will be integrated into high school laboratory activities taught by undergraduate students, in total involving 40 undergraduates in outreach and 600 high school students over 5 years. The university courses mutually reinforce research and teaching, training students to formulate and communicate meaningful new research questions. By permanently raising the caliber of science offerings in minority-serving schools, this project will showcase how collaboration between K-12 and higher education can motivate a diverse population of students, promote college readiness, and encourage academic interest in the physical sciences.
