INSTOC's initiative invites participation of international collaborators

By Susan S. Lang

With worldwide projects ranging from the Andes to Madagascar and from Morocco to Tibet, the Institute for the Study of the Continents (INSTOC) at Cornell hosts more than a dozen programs for the study of the deep continental crust, earthquake and volcano regions, plate tectonics and other geodynamic processes.

Larry Brown, left, professor of geological sciences and director of the Institute for the Study of the Continents (INSTOC), and Muawia Barazangi, earth and atmospheric sciences professor and associate director of INSTOC, pose in front of a map of the Middle East in Snee Hall last month. Robert Barker/University Photography

A new global initiative, however, aims to establish INSTOC as the pre-eminent institute for the study of continents. The institute is inviting scientists of outstanding international stature and disciplinary breadth to serve as collaborators on projects throughout the world and to affiliate with Cornell on an ongoing basis as visiting research scientists.

"The continents remain a key frontier for important, large-scale geoscience investigations, a frontier that hosts many of our natural resources and natural hazards," said Larry Brown, professor of geological sciences in the College of Engineering at Cornell and the new director of INSTOC as of June 2004. "To leverage our talents and expertise with those international collaborators, INSTOC is in the midst of fortifying our national facility with international expertise."

Among the first appointments is that of Rainer Kind, a professor at the GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam in Germany, who is the first recipient of the Jack E. Oliver Visiting Professorship. Oliver, now professor emeritus at Cornell, founded INSTOC in 1980 to serve as a base for exploration of the continental crust. He was a founding contributor to the theory of plate tectonics and a pioneer in using oil exploration techniques to study the deep crust. Kind will visit Cornell twice over the next two years, each for two weeks, to expand collaborative research and to lecture. The visits will allow him to forge formal ties with Cornell scientists and to help plan future research initiatives. In addition, Victor Ramos, a professor at the University of Buenos Aires and a pre-eminent expert on the Andes Mountains, will begin a term as adjunct professor with INSTOC. The institute also plans to host an annual roundtable, to encourage collaborators to generate research proposals and to conduct monthly research seminars.

"By using INSTOC to harness international ties in a more efficient fashion and coordinate various research programs around the world, we hope to develop a synergy and international cooperation that will expand our capabilities," explained Brown. "In other words, we are forming an international brain trust, if you will, with a focus on the evolution of the continents."

The Cornell scientists not only want to glean more fundamental knowledge about how the continents evolved but also to gain a better understanding of mountain belts, volcanic activity and how continents are built. In addition, they seek to enhance understanding of the distribution of natural resources and to assess better the risk of earthquake and volcanoes around the world.

Examples of current INSTOC-affiliated projects are:

• Research with more than 20 institutions in the Middle East and North Africa, including Morocco, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Oman and Saudi Arabia, on the relation between faults, tectonic plates and earthquake hazards. "We can document that most of the historical destruction that is widespread in this region [is] the result of large earthquakes along the Dead Sea fault," explained Muawia Barazangi, associate director of INSTOC and professor of geological sciences.

• Studies of mountains formed when continents collide, such as in the Himalaya-Tibet region, and when island arcs collide and accrete with adjacent continents, such as in the area of Taiwan, one of the most seismically active areas in the world.

• A long term effort to understand the Andes, the world's best example of a mountain belt which has formed without a continental collision. The Cornell Andes Project, which involves many INSTOC scientists, is the world's premier multidisciplinary program to understand the structure and evolution of this backbone of South America.

• Seismic imaging of deep magma chambers. A new frontier initiative involving INSTOC is the attempt to delineate active magma chambers beneath one of the world's most active volcanoes on the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean. The goal is to image changes in deep magma over time to forecast better the eruptive history of explosive volcanoes like Washington's Mount St. Helens.

INSTOC also is home to the Geoscience Information System Project, an effort to centralize information and knowledge in the geosciences and to provide access, modeling and visualization tools to users worldwide. Institute researchers also developed "Discover Our Earth," a Web-based teaching and learning tool for undergraduate students and for middle- and high-school teachers and students. The Web site allows classrooms to access advanced GIS (geographic information systems) and mapping abilities and to use simple interactive tools to explore the same data sets that researchers use.

"This rebirth of INSTOC gives us the opportunity to organize international efforts in a more productive way," said Brown. "Right now, there are no international institutions focusing on the continents the way there are for the oceans. We want to change that."

INSTOC is affiliated with the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in the College of Engineering.