This award supports a two-week planning visit to Taiwan by the PI and two undergraduate students in early 2008. The focus of the visit will be establishing quantitatively the time of development of fabrics in the critical rocks of the backbone slates and the Tananao complex in the Central Range in Taiwan. This is part of an effort to better understand the absolute ages of many of the structures in the Taiwan orogenic belt. In the absence of these data, disagreements within the scientific community have flourished over when and why the mountains are rising and which structures are consequences of which processes. The project will be carried out in collaboration with Professor Ching-Hua Lo of the Department of Geosciences at National Taiwan University and Professor Chin-Ho Tsai of the Institute of Earth Sciences at National Hualien University of Education.
