New Strategies for Studying the Crust, Lithosphere, and Tectonics of the Gulf of Mexico Region

The Gulf of Mexico region is home to increasing numbers of people and increasing economic activity, but it is also increasingly vulnerable to natural hazards such as hurricanes, flooding, sea level rise, and tsunamis. We need to better understand the crustal and lithospheric structure of this region and its tectonic evolution in order to prepare for the future, but it is not easy to carry out these studies because the crust is buried beneath thousands of meters of sediment. We need geophysics in particular to image the crust and lithosphere, and we need these images to constrain tectonic and subsidence models. Geophysical experiments are expensive, and the increasing financial pressures that NSF is experiencing are impeding progress. Thus, we need some new strategies for advancing studies of crustal and lithospheric structure and the tectonic evolution of the Gulf of Mexico, as well as its margin. The hydrocarbon industry has a major stake in this region, and invests heavily in geophysics. One way forward would be to implement new partnerships between the academic and industrial geoscience communities. A potential new strategy could be establishing a new NSF program that encourages such partnerships, based on funding from both companies and NSF and possibly state and federal agencies. Such a program must differ from existing industry-university consortia in that some data and results would not be proprietary and would be subject to the same rules that apply any other NSF-funded projects. An example of how this might work would be to have an industry active source seismic experiment that could "listen" longer for seismic waves than industry needs to image the sediments. Proprietary aspects of projects could be data needed to image the sedimentary strata in the basin, and the non-proprietary data would be used to study the structure of the crust and upper lithosphere. The recording effort would ideally be accompanied by IRIS instrument center supported studies that would add a variety of seismic monitoring (short and long term). This instrumentation along with seismic sources supported by the NSF-funded source facility at the University of Texas at El Paso would make possible to record deep and 3-D data. Academic geoscientists and students could be funded by NSF and potentially industry to work on the nonproprietary data.