ITHACA, N.Y. -- To understand the collision of continents and to better monitor the birth of earthquakes, Cornell University geologists have been awarded a $400,000 grant by the National Science Foundation for a three-year study in eastern Turkey.
Eastern Turkey, often referred to as the Turkish plateau, is one of the most seismically active and is the youngest continent-to-continent plate boundary region on Earth. It is also one of the least studied.
"This is the only place on the planet that still has young colliding continental plates," says Eric Sandvol, a geology department research associate who will be spending several months over the next year in Turkey setting up and monitoring an array of 30 temporary seismic recording stations, spanning about 300 miles.
Other members of the Cornell research team include Cornell research associate Dogan Seber, Cornell graduate student Ali Al-Lazki and team leader Muawia Barazangi, a geology professor and associate director of the Institute for the Study of the Continents (INSTOC). Seber is Turkish, and Barazangi is from neighboring Syria.
The stations will consist of a portable broad-band instrument -- basically a seismometer attached to a computer -- that will record seismic waves produced by distant and local earthquakes. Many stations will be buried several feet beneath a small hut. Others will be located in basements of schools and other public buildings.
"In eastern Turkey, the collision process is only about 10 million years old and depicts what the Tibet plateau looked like 25 million years ago. In other words, Turkey could have mountains like the Himalayas 20 million years from now," Sandvol says.
The Cornell geologists will collaborate with Turkish scientists at the Kandilli Seismological Observatory in Istanbul. Cornell and Kandilli scientists will monitor the tectonic plates around the clock for a year to capture "a snapshot or a CAT-scan-type image of the what the Earth looks like 250 miles deep," says Sandvol.
The Cornell scientists will combine their data with geophysical, geological, geochronological and geochemical measurements that geologists have collected from the surface to produce a coherent picture of the geodynamic processes in the region. The information gleaned will help assess the earthquake hazards in the region and add vital information to what is known about plate tectonics and the building of mountains.
"Ever since the advent of plate tectonics in the 1960s, earth scientists have been trying to better understand the nature of continental collision and deformation. The Anatolian plateau in eastern Turkey offers a unique and excellent opportunity to understand the early stages of this process," says Barazangi. "Understanding these early stages is essential to modeling the later stages of continental collision."
The Cornell scientists hope to determine what is happening to the Arabian plate as it collides with the Eurasian plate; is it being subducted, delaminated or neither? Other questions are how the plate is being supported, what the specific earthquake hazards and regional tectonics are, how thick the tectonic plates are in the region, how thick the crust is and what the velocities of the seismic waves are.
Related World Wide Web sites: The following sites provide additional information on this news release. Some might not be part of the Cornell University community, and Cornell has no control over their content or availability.
-- To see Cornell's Middle East and North Africa GIS databases, see http://atlas.geo.cornell.edu/
-- To see more information on research associate Eric Sandvol and Dogan Seber, see http://atlas.geo.cornell.ed u/people/eric.html
http://atlas.geo.cornell.e du/people/seber.html
-- For more information on the Department of Geology at Cornell, see http://www.geo.cornell.edu/