Earthquakes put much of the world's population at risk but remain the most unpredictable natural hazard. Repeated fault motion during earthquakes is also a major tectonic agent, building much of Earth's relief and accommodating at the surface the convection current from the interior. Earthquake seismology and tectonics represent two end-member aspects of fault mechanics, one focusing on the short-term and the other on the long-term aspects of plate boundary behavior. Both are the focus of much geophysical research, in the U. S. and abroad. Most researchers concentrate on one of these topics, with only a vague awareness of the advances made in the other field. MYRES is the perfect forum for forcing a collision between these fields. Dedicating the second meeting to plate boundary mechanics will forge a new generation of Earth scientists able to address both short-term and long term fault behavior, to tackle fundamental geological problems as well as problems of great societal importance.
Jeanne Hardebeck (currently a Mendenhall postdoctoral fellow at the US Geological Survey) and Laurent G. J. Montési (Assistant Scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) have expressed interest in co-chairing a second MYRES conference on Understanding the dynamics of the lithosphere: Multidisciplinary approaches to the behavior of plate boundaries. They envision a meeting of young scientists investigating plate boundary mechanics from a broad range of perspectives, including seismology, tectonics, geology, geodesy, geodynamics, geochemistry and laboratory experimentation. This meeting will give participants a more thorough understanding of each of these fields, and facilitate new collaborations.
To foster interdisciplinary interaction, major questions will be organized not by discipline, but by topics related to the physics of deformation. In the preliminary meeting agenda, the first day introduces the topic by presenting the structure of the lithosphere, particularly in plate boundary regions. The second day addresses the mechanisms by which the lithosphere deforms, covering both brittle and ductile deformation. The third day is devoted to the dynamics of plate boundaries, from the short-term behavior during earthquakes to the long-term behavior of the development and evolution of fault systems. The final day focuses on the strength of the lithosphere and the origin of applied stresses. At the end of the meeting, both earthquake physicists and tectonicists should have a better grasp on the physics of plate boundary deformation and the interaction between earthquakes and tectonics.
A preliminary agenda for the second MYRES meeting is as follows. For each day, five questions are identified. It will be the (sometimes arduous) task of the invited speakers to review a particular topic, having in mind to answer these questions.