Intellectual Merit: The fifth State of the Arc (SOTA) conference will be convened September 19-25, 2010 at Syros and Santorini, Greece. Its theme will be ?Subduction to Eruption?, and sub-themes will include: (1) prograde metamorphic reaction within subducted materials; (2) geophysical and geodynamic constraints on arc magmatism; (3) observational and experimental constraints on heat and mass balance in arc magmas at mantle and crust levels; (4) time-scales of degassing and differentiation of magmas; and (5) volcanic hazards. This conference will bring together ~75 international researchers and students whose work bears on these themes. This proposal seeks funding from NSF for the registration fee for about ten graduate students or postdocs and about ten invited speakers. Experience has shown that a ?Gordon Conference?-style format allows SOTA meetings to address critical questions and facilitate new research directions amongst participants. Approximately 11 keynote speakers and provocateurs will be invited whose tasks will be to summarize past and cutting edge research bearing on the aforementioned sub-themes. Other participants will present relevant research results, primarily in poster format. The majority of the time of the conference will revolve around extended and focused discussion of the relation between geodynamic processes, magma differentiation, and volcano hazards. The provocateurs will be invited to stimulate these discussions. Field trips on Syros and Santorini will view important aspects of subducted materials and arc volcanism. The organizing committee will convene the meeting and will be responsible for inviting keynote speakers and attracting other participants, guiding the scientific content of the meeting, and preparing a written summary for publication.
Broader Impacts: About half the funds from the NSF will be used to pay the registration fee for young researchers. This will ensure that the next generation of researchers will participate in and see the benefit of international scientific cooperation at an early stage in their careers. It also will provide the opportunity of these young researchers to interact with internationally recognized experts. The small size of the meeting and the involvement of researchers with diverse backgrounds (geologists, petrologists, geochemists, and geophysicists) will foment dialogue between different groups, which is critical to identifying important issues to address and viable, international partnerships to address them. Hazards will play a more central role in this SOTA meeting than earlier ones, and it is expected that progress will be made in developing tools to predict hazards trajectories for volcanoes utilizing petrological, geochemical, and geophysical information.
The circum-Pacific "Ring of Fire", which marks sites of subduction (continental and island "arcs") in plate tectonics, contains most of the Earth’s subaerial volcanoes and creates most of its volcanic hazards. Every four years or so, specialists in this field gather informally to discuss recent discoveries and testable hypotheses. The meetings are called "State of the Arc" or SOTA. In September 2010, about 75 international scientists met in Greece. Delegates went first to the island of Syros for one day of science presentations and another of field-based debate about what happens to subducting sediment en route to the site of magma genesis ~100 km beneath arc volcanoes. The rest of the meeting was held at the Santorini Conference Center. Hour-long keynote talks preceded single-slide presentations on common themes: geodynamics; experimental petrology; time scales of processes; cycling of volatiles; and eruption hazards. Each day started at 0900 and ended at 1800 or later after discussion around posters. The meeting closed with a day-long field trip documenting the eruption history of Santorini. Key discoveries reported this year included: the need for water saturation of subducted materials at >100 km beneath arc volcanoes or advection of those materials upward into the core of the mantle wedge; along-strike variations in geodynamics, slab surface temperature, and magma sources; the importance of redox, halogens, and sulfur during magma genesis and degassing; the importance of accessory minerals (e.g., rutile, zircon, monazite) during magma genesis and evolution; and the importance of combining petrology with volcano monitoring when developing volcanic risk assessment strategies. NSF funded about 2/3 of the registration fee for 15 graduate students and post-docs plus the keynote speakers and meeting organizers, thereby guaranteeing a high level of scientific discussion and the inclusion of the next generation of scientists. The young scientists gave short presentations of their work, and presented their own summary of key discoveries and future research opportunities. The registration fee covered common expenses. Participants paid for their own airfare plus lodging and food on Santorini. The web site for the meeting is www.thira.gr/News/Events/StateoftheArcConference%28SOTA2010%29:SubductiontoEruption.html.
