Findings and Recommendations - Basic Research Opportunities in Earth Science - page 89

data to the entire Earth science community. These data are critical to the study of
the continents and deep interior, two major areas of scientific opportunity
discussed in Chapter 2 . A second example is the Continental Dynamics (CD)
Program, begun in 1984 in response to an NRC report 9 and now an EAR core
program with an annual budget of about $9 million. The CD program funds
multidisciplinary research that focuses on an improved understanding of the
processes governing the origin, structure, composition, and dynamical evolution
of the continents; it is thus complementary to the facility-oriented IRIS program.
10
In the following section, two major research initiatives are considered: (1)
EarthScope, a facility-oriented program for observing the structure and active
deformation of the North American continent, and (2) an Earth Science Natural
Laboratory program (ESNL), which would support long-term, multidisciplinary
observatories of terrestrial processes in specific field areas. Funding for the first
stage of EarthScope has been proposed in the President's 2001 budget request, 11
whereas the ESNL program is still in the conceptual stage.
EarthScope
EarthScope is an NSF initiative to build a distributed, multipurpose set of
instruments and observatories that will substantially enhance the capabilities of
Earth scientists to investigate the following research topics:
• Earthquakes and seismic hazards
• Magmatic systems and volcanic hazards
• Active tectonics
• Fluids in the crust
9 Opportunities for Research in the Geological Sciences, National Academy Press,
Washington, D.C., 95 pp., 1983.
10 The CD program is particularly oriented toward projects whose scope and complexity
require a cooperative or multi-institutional approach and multiyear planning and
execution. The program funds only relatively large projects that do not fit easily within
other EAR programs and that have broad support within the Earth science community. The
program also funds research as part of the interagency Continental Scientific Drilling and
Exploration Program.
11 The request for EarthScope in the President's FY 2001 budget is $17.4 million in FY
2001, $28.5 million in FY 2002, $15.7 million in FY 2003, and $13.2 million in FY 2004.
The total request under the NSF's Major Research Equipment program is $74.8 million,
which covers only the acquisition, construction, and deployment aspects of EarthScope-
Phase I (USArray, the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth).