US-Egypt Workshop: U.S. Participation in Project JEBEL Workshop; Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, October 2008

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0821257 SternDescription: This award is to support U.S. Participation in a ?US-Egypt Workshop on Northern Arabian-Nubia Shield-Project JEBEL?, to be held in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt in October 2008. The US organizer is Dr. Robert Stern, Center for Lithospheric Studies, University of Texas at Dallas. The Egyptian organizer is Dr. Osama Kassem, National Research Center, Cairo, Egypt. The project JEBEL (Jordanian and Egyptian Basement EvoLution) is funded for three years by the Swedish government through a grant to Prof. Vicky Pease of Stockholm University. It resulted from a Planning Workshop held in Egypt in February 2007, and attended by scientists from 8 different countries. The Swedish grant covers research and travel by Swedish, Egyptian, and Jordanian participants only, with U.S, Saudi, Norwegian, and German scientists to secure funding in their respective countries. This award will support the participation of four U.S. scientists in two field research and planning workshops for this new international research effort. The first workshop will be held in October 2008 in Egypt and the second to be held in Jordan in winter 2009-2010. Both workshops will discuss results of research to date and discuss future research priorities. Four days of field trips to key geologic localities in the southern Sinai and discussions are planned, in tandem with a day of research presentations and planning. Because US participation was key to the success of the 2007 workshop, and will be important for success of Project JEBEL, both the Swedes and the U.S. sides want to continue the US scientists? participation in this effort, which should lead to a complementary NSF effort. Intellectual merit: Project JEBEL focuses on four challenges: 1) understanding the Neoproterozoic evolution of Jordan, the Eastern Desert of Egypt (EDE), and in particular the central EDE, via geochronological, geochemical, stratigraphic, and structural studies; 2) facilitating geological correlations across the Red Sea, extrapolation of economic zones, and constraining palinspastic reconstructions of the Red Sea region; 3) correlating Neoproterozoic terranes and paleogeography within the Neoproterozoic orogen; and 4) contributing to understanding the development of the Neoproterozoic Earth environment. The results will be useful for estimating total offsets across the Red Sea from geologic markers. The northern part of the Arabian-Nubian Shield is one of the least studied parts of the major Pan-African Orogen that extends the full length of the African continent, and these workshops will focus international attention on the area. The two U.S. senior scientists, Dr. Stern and Dr. Peter Johnson (of JV Associates Ltd.) will have major inputs because of their extensive experiences in the region. Broader impacts: The involvement of both a current (Kamal Ali) and a former (Dr Mohamed Abdelsalam) PhD students of Dr. Stern will be of considerable benefit, and meets the goal of supporting early-career researchers. The involvement of the US team will potentially lead to new partnerships in research effort involving US scientists in a developing EU-Egypt-Jordan initiative, potentially providing important information on the geology of this region. The results from the workshops and research papers are expected to be widely disseminated, as Dr Stern has set-up a website for this project: http://www.utdallas.edu/~rjstern/egypt/. The observations made in the workshops will be used in this wider venue for virtual field guides and giving other investigators access to the observations. This project is being supported by the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Division of Earth Sciences.