General Conclusions

Perhaps one of the more important talks of the meeting regarding the evolving community was given by Tom Jordan, who discussed the SCEC model for community organization. The following is Jordan’s list of ingredients for successful science integration, annotated in italics with the organizing committee’s assessment of the status for the Great Basin.

• Problem focus

– Regional tectonics & hazards

– In the Great Basin, this is the same.

• Common objectives

– Community data products & models

– The workshop concluded that a community model of the Great Basin, giving fault locations and crustal structure, is an important goal for Earthscope in this region.

• Community identity & organization

– History of collaboration, interactive working groups

– The GreatBREAK workshop is the starting point for this community identity development.

• Collaboratory infrastructure

– Code validation, standardization of products

– For this, we can collaborate closely with SCEC, as the codes we need are generally similar if not idetnical.

• Regular forums for assessing progress

– Workshops, annual meeting

– GreatBREAK may be the first of these events. The organizers believe that annual meetings focused on Earthscope in the Great Basin are appropriate. The organizers are aware of at least a few collaborations that developed as a result of the workshop.

• Funding

– To support collaboration/collaboratory activities

– At the present time, funding is not large since the science budget to utilize Earthscope data is only about $4 million/year, and must be spread over more regions and experiments than those in the Great Basin. However, these funds are able to support the most important experiments, and NSF expresses a long-term commitment to increasing the size of the research budget.

The Great Basin is a type location for the breaking apart of a continent. As such, these studies will be setting a precedent for understanding such processes on a global scale. The studies that go on here have international significance, and there are indications that the international community is as excited as the US community about the opportunities.

In the final analysis, one of the greatest legacies of EarthScope is likely to be discoveries that nobody in the workshop was able to imagine. New data is generally the starting point for important discoveries, and this compelling point was a focal point for the excitement and enthusiasm expressed at GreatBREAK.