Images of the Earth's Crust & Upper Mantle

Updated: Dec 09, 2024

IGCP Project 474 Business meeting, 2004

(Extract from the IGCP Project 474 Annual Report, 2004)

A project business meeting was held on 5 October, 2004 at Mont Tremblant, Quebec, Canada, during the 11th International Conference on Deep Seismic Imaging of the Continents.

Present: B. Drummond (Australia, Chair), O.Oncken (Germany), R. Hobbs (UK), S. Li (China), G. Fuis (USA), F. Cook (Canada). L. Brown (USA) was appraised on the business during the following days of the symposium.

The meeting reviewed the project progress during 2004 and considered forward planning. Among the issues considered were:

1. Transects: The committee decided that each compilation should be copied to a CD and held centrally (at the moment by the Project Chairman) in order to preserve the compilation if the hosting web site is no longer maintained, at which time it can be loaded onto a new host and the links from earthcrust.org updated.
2. Web compilation resources: Some concern was expressed about the lack of resources for getting poster compilations at conferences transformed into web sites. Poster papers at conferences are acknowledged in academic circles as desirable, but funding agencies prefer to fund new data acquisition rather than the redisplay and review of old results.
3. Publicity: Although there was considerable enthusiasm for the work done in the project to date, there was a need to find ways to get more people involved. Publicity of work done to date would be a help.
4. Sponsorship: The spending profile in the project may be working against us. Although the block sponsorship funding through the conference organisers was used to support a large number of students and speakers, the UN funds offered directly by the Committee in small seed amounts to a large number of people had limited success. The Committee therefore decided to offer larger amounts to carefully targeted people for future meetings.
5. Historical data: The project needed to encourage more examples of historic data to be compiled.
6. Data repositories: The Executive Committee also considered the establishment of a central data repository. Such an undertaking would require significant seismic data handling facilities. It was felt that the resources for such a facility were currently beyond the project without an offer from a national institution.

Partnerships

Institutions in India and Georgia have expressed an interest in participating in IGCP Project 474 activities.

In India a National Working Group has been formed under the chairmanship of Sri A. K. Agrawal, Deputy Director General, Geological Survey of India, Kokata. The working group held a meeting in Kolkata on 2 September, 2004, to consider ways and means of contributing to the IGCP Project 474 aim of providing images of the Earth's crust to at least Moho depths.

In Georgia a working group within the Institute of Geology, Georgian Academy of Sciences, Tbilisi, is conducting research into the nature of the continental lithosphere as a contribution to the aims and objectives of the International Lithosphere Project (ILP). The research is linked to the search for oil/gas and the research into the nature of active fault zones and earthquake risk.