Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
The combination of these two initiatives equals the average budget of the
established disciplinary core programs—the minimum level plausible for
long-term support of geobiology. The allocation of new funds to
geobiology would free resources within the G&P core program for
expanded research on the Critical Zone.
• Although the hydrology community is large and well established, the NSF
core program in hydrologic sciences is relatively new and expends less
than $3 million on investigator-initiated research projects.
Correspondingly, the success rate of hydrology proposals (19%) is far
below the EAR average (31%). The recommended increment in funding
($5 million) would bring hydrologic sciences in line with other
disciplinary core programs and the research opportunities available to this
field.
• The community that does basic research on Earth and planetary materials
is also well defined and serves the full breadth of the geosciences, though
it is smaller than the major Earth science disciplines. The recommended
budget in this area ($5 million) would be sufficient to establish a new core
program and to fund EAR participation in the National Nanotechnology
Initiative.
• Substantial funding ($4 million) is allocated to promote interactions
between the Earth science and planetary science communities and to
exploit research opportunities arising in the comparative study of solar
and extrasolar planets, with a focus on the use of Earth science techniques
for the analysis of samples returned from extraterrestrial objects and data
on planetary surfaces and interiors.
• EAR is requesting substantial funds from Major Research Equipment
(MRE) for the equipment and facility components of the EarthScope
initiative. The $10 million in Table 3.1 is for the funding of basic research
that uses EarthScope data; it thus excludes the MRE equipment and
facility costs. The special emphasis areas in AT and CSEDI, which are
currently budgeted at about $1 million each, would be appropriate
programs to handle the EarthScope-related increments to the research
funding.
• The largest single item in Table 3.1 is for the ESNL program. The
committee envisages a program that would expend an average of about $4
million per year on each natural laboratory, with at least five laboratories
active at any given time. For comparison, the average cost of LTER sites
is about $2 million. However, ESNLs would typically be more expensive
because of the high cost of subsurface sampling and imaging. For
example, the projected six-year cost of the SAFOD project, a component
of EarthScope (see Box 2.2 ), is $27 million, or $4.5 million per year. A
significant fraction of ESNL funding (about one-quarter) would probably
be devoted to instrumentation and mobile laboratories and would thus
supplement the I&F core program.
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