US-Lebanon Planning Visit: Initiation of Collaborative Research on Active Tectonics, Seismology and Earthquake Hazard Assessment

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Description: This award is to support a planning visit by three US scientists to Lebanon and Syria to conduct preliminary geological field work and to organize a program for a collaborative research on active tectonics, seismology, and earthquake hazard assessment. The US principal investigator is Dr. Muawai Barazangi, of the Institute of the Study of the Continents at Cornell University. The collaborators include Dr. Kamal Khair, Geology Department of the American University of Beirut (AUB), and Dr. Charles Tabet, Director of the National Center for Geophysics of the Lebanese National Council for Scientific Research (NCSR). The US scientists also plan to use this occasion to attend the 4th International Conference on the Geology of the Middle East, to be held in Beirut in November 1998. Lebanon occupies a critical area along the Dead Sea fault system in which regional strain is transferred between two long fault segments by a large bend in the fault system. The proposed study will help scientists to understand the processes of an active, continental transform fault, which is similar in many ways to the San Andreas fault system in southern California. Scope: This planning visit will help the US and Lebanese scientists prepare proposals for collaborative research in an area that is scientifically important. The P.I. has excellent credentials in the area of seismological investigations in the Middle East and North Africa. The AUB, which follows the American academic and research models, has a good reputation, and thus the collaboration with its scientists would likely be quite productive. One of the two persons travelling with the P.I. is a junior scientist who recently received the Ph.D. degree, and the other is a graduate student working on his Ph.D. These two will have an opportunity for a productive international scientific experience.