This award provides support for the 25th International Himalaya-Karakorum-Tibet (HKT) Workshop. The HKT workshop provides an annual opportunity for geologists, geophysicists, geochemists, geomorphologists, and other workers to present and assess recent findings from work in the region and to plan the following year?s activity. This conference traditionally meets alternate years in an HKT country (Nepal/China/India etc.) and alternate years in a western country to allow for broader participation. The 11th HKT meeting was the only one to have been held in the US (1996 in Flagstaff, AZ). The international community has now asked the US to host the 25th HKT Workshop in 2010, and a group of scientists from San Francisco State University, Stanford, and UC Santa Cruz has accepted the task of organizing this meeting.
Since the previous North American HKT meeting in 1996, US workers have continued to make huge advances in Himalayan and Tibetan geosciences: EAR/CD has continued to fund much research in Tibet and the Himalaya, including such flagship programs as the continuing INDEPTH integrated geoscience program, the Hi-CLIMB seismic transect across central Tibet, and the Nanga Parbat and Namche Barwa projects studying geomorphic-geodynamic-climate couplings at both the southern and northern margins of the Plateau; as well as much more ?traditional? geology.
The strong support given by NSF to Himalaya-Tibet studies has yielded a spectacular increase in our understanding, but also raised the questions, do we know enough? Are there important gaps in our knowledge and understanding of Tibet? Where and how will the next key advances be made? Why should NSF continue to support large-scale studies in Tibet and the Himalaya? The Workshop will enable NSF funded scientists to come together to discuss these questions; to assess progress and to plan to direct activities in the coming years to where more data is needed to fill in the gaps. An outcome of the meeting will be a brief white paper to inform NSF how university scientists hope to capitalize on the previous NSF-funded field campaigns in Tibet and the Himalaya, and to justify future directions for investment in this area.
For a quarter of a century the Himalayan-Karakoram-Tibet (HKT) Workshop has provided scientists studying the India-Asia collision system a wonderful opportunity for workshop-style discussion with colleagues working in this region. In 2010, HKT returned to North America for the first time since 1996. The 25th international workshop was held from June 7 to 10 at San Francisco State University, California. The international community was invited to contribute scientific papers to the workshop, on all aspects of geoscience research in the geographic area of the Tibetan Plateau and its bounding ranges and basins, from basic mapping to geochemical and isotopic analyses to large-scale geophysical imaging experiments. In recognition of the involvement of U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) scientists in a wide range of these activities, the USGS agreed to publish the extended abstracts of the numerous components of HKT-25 as an online Open-File Report, thereby ensuring the wide availability and distribution of these abstracts, particularly in the HKT countries from which many active workers are precluded by cost from attending international meetings. The extended abstracts are permanently and publicly available at http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2010/1099/. In addition to the workshop characterized by contributed presentations, participants were invited to attend a pre-meeting field trip from the Coast Ranges to the Sierra Nevada, to allow the international group to consider how the tectonic elements of the Pacific margin compare to those of the Himalayan belt. Following the workshop, the National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored a workshop on the "Future directions for NSF-sponsored geoscience research in the Himalaya/Tibet" intended to provide NSF Program Directors with a clear statement and vision of community goals for the future, including the scientific progress we can expect if NSF continues its support of projects in this geographic region, and to identify which key geoscience problems and processes are best addressed in the Himalaya and Tibet, what key datasets are needed, and how NSF can best support the evolving need for interdisciplinary investigations. This workshop also has clear societal relevance. Recent earthquakes have brought international attention to active tectonics and earthquake hazards in the HKT region. Prominent examples include the Mw 7.8 Kokoxili (Qinghai, China) earthquake of 2001, the Mw 7.6 Kashmir (Pakistan) earthquake of 2005, the Mw 7.9 Wenchuan (Sichuan, China) earthquake of 2008, and this year the Mw 6.9 Yushu (Qinghai, China) earthquake. Geological and geophysical field work conducted both before these earthquakes, as well as in response to them, has helped to define the active faults and regional tectonics in the HKT region. The research presented at this workshop provides the framework necessary for improved seismic hazard assessments in this region. The organizers gratefully acknowledge the support of NSF’s Continental Dynamics Program and its Office of International Science and Engineering, through award EAR-0965796 in making these workshops possible. Participants included research scientists, post-doctoral scholars, graduate, and undergraduate students from the U.S. and abroad: 144 participants in the 25th Himalaya-Karakoram-Tibet workshop, 75 participants in the workshop on "Future directions for NSF-sponsored geoscience research in the Himalaya/Tibet", and 26 participants in the pre-workshop field trip on the "Geology of the Mesozoic-Cenozoic convergent margin of northern California".
