Scope

The design of MYRES draws on the experience of established meetings such as the Gordon Research Conferences or summer schools such as those held in Erice, Sicily. MYRES meetings with their focus on bringing junior people together to tackle an interdisciplinary problem are, however, unique in that they serve several purposes:

• MYRES workshops are part of a larger vision of a grass-roots community building effort in the Solid Earth Sciences. MYRES' website with online reference material and discussion forums will be our first attempt to broaden the impact of each meeting, and to foster communication and review of instruction, research and conference objectives among the wider community.

• MYRES workshops are summer-school type educational efforts, where junior experts from different fields convene to explain the constraints and issues involved in their discipline's contribution to the larger problem at hand. The breadth of peer-reviewed instruction will be a great resource and go far beyond what individual university departments can typically provide.

• MYRES workshops will stimulate open discussion and facilitate the formulation of future collaborative research efforts and so advance Solid Earth Sciences.

• MYRES will provide younger researchers with a community of peers from which to draw on and with which to communicate beyond their traditional limits.

We are aware of two meeting series in the Earth Sciences that are aimed at junior researchers, the Physical Oceanography Dissertation Symposium (PODS¹) and the Atmospheric Chemistry Colloquium for Emerging Senior Scientists (ACCESS²). Both meetings are aimed at bringing together recent PhDs to foster future professional relationships, in the case of ACCESS with explicit participation of representatives from funding agencies. We do not know of any such effort in the Solid Earth Sciences. While MYRES is, like those workshops, intended to serve as a community building tool, MYRES will, unlike those meetings, also have an additional educational focus on a well defined scientific problem, with quality controlled instructional material as a tangible product. We note in passing that MYRES is decidedly not meant to be a job-market initiative; on the contrary, it is an attempt to disconnect from the politics of a scientific career temporarily and focus on the science itself in a cooperative environment.

MYRES workshops will be held once every two years, addressing varying interdisciplinary themes from Solid Earth for $\sim$4 days during an extended weekend in the late summer. Provided funding for this proposal in the fall of 2003, an ambitious but possible starting date would be 2004, else the first meeting would be held 2005. Starting in 2004 would allow us, for example, to be out of phase with the Gordon Conference on the Interior of the Earth; we intend to complement rather than replace the current crop of conferences.