Collaborative Research: Crustal Evolution of the Bering Shelf-Chukchi Sea Region

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9316573 Wright Since the advent of plate tectonics, earth scientists have increasingly emphasized the importance of the lateral growth of continental crust by the processes of terrane accretion and magmatic arc development. The Cordilleran orogen of North America is one of the prime examples of such crustal growth, and the Alaskan portion of this belt is considered to have been constructed almost entirely by the process of terrane accretion. This study will undertake an ambitious geological and geophysical transect across the northernmost portion of the Cordilleran orogen in the Bering-Chukchi region of the Arctic, between mainland Alaska and Russia. The main goals of the research are to provide us with greater insight into the details of the creation, evolution and modification of the crust beneath Cordilleran-style oroginic belts, to give us a better understanding of the coupling between tectonic and petrologic processes at deep and shallow crustal levels, and to help us determine the general links between processes at the scale of the crust and those at the plate tectonic scale. The project is a collaborative effort by researchers at Stanford (Miller and Klemperer), Rice (Wright), UC Santa Barbara (Gans), and Western Washington (Engebretson). The project also involves scientists from the USGS Branches of Pacific Marine Geology (Scholl, Childs), of Alaskan Geology (Grantz, Moore), and of Seismology (Brocher), and three well-known Russian scientists from Khabarovsk (B. Natal'in), Yakutsk (L. Parfenov) and Magadan (M. Gelman). ***