December 2002
December
20th, 2002: President
Bush Signs NSF Doubling Bill Into
Law. On Thursday, 19 December
President Bush signed into law
H.R. 4664, a bill passed overwhelmingly
this Fall by the House and Senate.
The new law authorizes Congress
to boost NSF's funding from $4.79
billion to $9.84 billion over five
years. The law does not actually
provide money—that requires a
separate appropriations bill each
year. But it lays out a path for
Congress to nearly double NSF's
allocation in core research areas,
which includes the geosciences
as part of Research and Related
Activities (R&RA), as well
as substantially increasing funding
for new science infrastructure
under the Major Research Equipment
and Facilities Construction (MREFC)
account. Read more on this AGU
Science Legislative Alert web page.
December
18th, 2002: The Meetings
page is updated, and a special
web page summarizing MARGINS-related
sessions at the EGU (EGS+EUG) —
AGU Joint Assembly in Nice,
France, in April 2003 has been
posted.
December
4th, 2002: The Subduction
Factory web pages on this web site
have been reorganized to provide easier browsing
and access of information.
December
3rd, 2002: Announcing
the MARGINS Source-to-Sink Waipaoa Focus
Area Workshop, to be held May 4-9, 2003
in Gisborne, Wellington, New Zealand. Information on the
workshop and the application form are available at the Waipaoa
2003 workshop website.
December 2nd, 2002: MARGINS
Newsletter #9, Fall 2002 issue is in print and available
for download as a PDF
file (2.1 MB) from our Newsletter
page. Issue #9 is the thickest MARGINS newsletter ever,
and contains, among other, an article on New Zealand rivers,
an editorial column about marine mammals and conducting research
in foreign countries, workshop reports and a thematic set of
papers on the subject "Data Management in the
Earth Sciences." This is important and interesting
reading: please download and read it today!.
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November 2002
November 11th, 2002: MARGINS
Town Meeting at the AGU Fall Meeting: The Source-to-Sink
Initiative revisited. As previously
reported on this page, concerns for the competitiveness
of an earlier draft of the Source-to-Sink Science plan prompted
a revision of the document. The revised version was released
for community comments on October 4th, 2002. The MARGINS Office is organizing an
AGU Town Meeting to discuss the revised science plan and the
fiscal realities of the MARGINS program with the S2S community,
cognizant NSF program directors and members of the MARGINS
Steering Committee. The Town Meeting will be held at 7.00
PM on Saturday, 7th December, 2002, in Room 104 of the Moscone
Convention Center.
November 5th, 2002: MARGINS
Theoretical Institute on the Seismogenic Zone Experiment. A
five-day workshop will be held in Snowbird, Utah in March,
2003, to review our current understanding, and plan for further
activities of the Seismogenic Zone. Information about the workshop
is provided in the Workshop
Announcement, and applications should be made using the
web-based application form accessible from the SEIZE
2003 meeting web site.
November 5th, 2002: Two
new members have been appointed to the MARGINS
Steering Committee. It is our pleasure to welcome Geoff
Abers of Boston University, and Mark Reagan of
the University of Iowa to this important assignment.
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October 2002
October 18th, 2002: The
report from the Izu-Bonin-Mariana Subduction Factory
Workshop held in Honolulu, Hawaii, 8-12 September 2002,
is now available to read online or download as a PDF file from
the IBM 2002 workshop
web site.
October 15th, 2002: The
guidelines for preparing applications for the MARGINS
post-doctoral fellowships have been updated to reflect new
NSF proposal guidelines, and remove some redundancies.
October 8th, 2002: After
months of delay, the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee
that oversees spending for the National Science Foundation (NSF),
NASA, EPA, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
has drafted its version of a funding bill for fiscal year (FY)
2003, already one week old. The as-yet-unnumbered bill would
provide NSF with
$5.42 billion, nearly a 13% increase over FY 2002. The EarthScope project
would receive $40 million, twice the amount allocated
by the Senate and $5 million above the President's request. Research
accounts at NSF would receive $4.1 billion (up over 15%) within
which the Geosciences Directorate would receive $701 million
(up 15%). Read the entire story at the
AGU Science Legislative Alert web page.
October 6th, 2002: Important
reminder 2: As several big meetings are coming up
(among them GSA, AGU), it is stressed that all MARGINS-funded
projects need to acknowledge MARGINS-NSF-funding by displaying
the MARGINS-NSF logo on every conference contribution. This
is not optional; it is a requirement from NSF. The
logos can be downloaded in several different formats from the
logo page.
October 6th, 2002: Important
reminder 1: As the NSF deadline (1 November) draws
closer, all proposal writers are reminded of this very important
notice : Effective October 1, 2002, NSF will return without
review proposals that do not separately address both merit
review criteria within the Project Summary.
October 4th, 2002: Revised
draft of the Source-to-Sink Science Plan posted for comments.
In spite of the efforts of a large number of people and several
community workshops, both the NSF and the MARGINS Steering
Committee were concerned about the competitiveness of the previous
draft of the Source-to-Sink (S2S) science plan compared those
of the other three MARGINS initiatives. To remedy this situation,
a small group of scientists from the sedimentary geology and
S2S communities was commissioned to revise the science plan,
building on the firm foundation provided by the earlier drafts. The MARGINS Office is organizing an
AGU Town Meeting at 6.45 PM on Saturday, 7th December, 2002,
to ventilate the revised science plan and the fiscal realities
of the MARGINS program with the S2S community, cognizant NSF
program directors and members of the MARGINS Steering Committee.
Please keep visitng this web site for updates.
October, 2002: As
recently reported in Nature (vol. 419,
26 September 2002, page 328) the MARGINS-NSF-IFREE workshop on
the Izu-Bonin-Mariana Subduction Factory (IBM 2002) was held
last month in Honolulu, Hawai'i. In the next few weeks, presentations
and other material from the workshop will be posted on the IBM
2002 web site, which is hosted by MARGINS.
October, 2002: The
MARGINS Steering Committee met in Honolulu, Hawai'i immediately
following the IBM 2002 workshop. The agenda for
the meeting is posted on this web site, and highlights from the
meeting will be published in the upcoming issue of the MARGINS
Newsletter, which will be published prior to the AGU Fall
Meeting 2002. One very important item was that Julie
D. Morris of Washington University in St. Louis was elected
as the next MARGINS chair. The MARGINS
Steering Committee web page is updated to reflect recent
changes.
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September 2002
September 6th, 2002: The
penultimate draft of Living on a Restless Planet , the blue
ribbon Solid Earth Science Working Group's (SESWG) long term
vision for NASA's solid Earth Science program, is available
for review and comment at http://solidearth.jpl.nasa.gov
You are encouraged to carefully review this document and to comment on the
report directly to the SESWG at seswg@hq.nasa.gov. The report will be available
for review through September 30, 2002.
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August 2002
August 28th, 2002: New
workshop: R/V Maurice Ewing Midlife Refit Workshop posted
on the Meetings page
August 27th, 2002:
Several
updates to the IBM 2002
Workshop web site. Material of interest to non-participants
is and will be posted, so keep checking this page.
August 22nd, 2002: You
can now search both the MARGINS web site and the entire internet
for earth science-specific scientific information on the internet
via the Scirus Science Search Engine directly
from the MARGINS Search page.
August 16th, 2002: This News
page has changed appearance. Old news items are now
contained in archives (reached from current News page). An Announcements
web page has been added, which contains convenient links
to important announcements made in different contexts on this
web site and/or the MARGINS Mailing List.
August 15th, 2002: Deadlines
for the AGU Fall Meeting 2002 are closing in and several MARGINS-related
sessions are planned.
August 12th, 2002: NSF-OCE
contained in their Fall/Winter 2001 Newsletter a very important
statement about research ship safety and security. The importance
of this document, and its implications to future work in the
northern Red Sea Focus Area, are reiterated on this
web page.
August 12th, 2002: A
Request For Proposals for Focus Site data management has been
posted on the Related Documents page.
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July 2002
July 31st, 2002: The web
site for the MARGINS-NSF-IFREE workshop on the Izu-Bonin-Mariana
Subduction Factory is now online.
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June 2002
June 27th, 2002: The MARGINS-NSF
Awards database is updated with the funded programs for
2002, as well as some cosmetic changes to make browsing projects
easier.
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May 2002
May 31st, 2002: The
Spring 2002 issue of the MARGINS Newsletter, number 8, is off
to the presses and is also available for download as a PDF file
from the MARGINS Newsletter page.
May 15th, 2002: The
European Union of Geosciences (EUG) and the European Geophysical
Society (EGS) have for some time discussed the creation of a
new European organisation for the Geosciences, Ocean, Atmospheric
and Solar System Sciences. On 26th April 2002 the EUG Council
had a very cordial meeting with the Council of EGS where the
creation of a new Association, which would evolve from the two
present organisations, was decided. The notes of the meeting
are available on the web at http://eost.u-strasbg.fr/EUG
May 7th, 2002: The
report from the EarthScope workshop "The Making and Breaking
of a Continent" held in Snowbird, Utah, October 10-12th,
2001, entitled "EarthScope.
Scientific Targets for the World's largest Observatory Pointed
at the Solid Earth" is now available for download as
a PDF file at the EarthScope
web site.
May 1st, 2002: A MARGINS
web site for the planning of a Community Sediment Model (CSM) offers
the program and presentations (requires Internet Explorer 5
or later, or a PDF viewer) from the 2002 CSM workshop held
in February in Boulder, CO. You can also join an online discussion
forum and get information on upcoming events.
May 1st, 2002: The InterMARGINS
web site has a new look and expanded content. You can now
sign up for a mailing list, there is a schedule of upcoming
meetings and more.
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April 2002
April 9th, 2002: The
NANTROSEIZE workshop annoucement has been added to the Meetings
page.
April 1st, 2002: The Meetings
page has been updated.
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March 2002
March 19th, 2002: The NSF-IFREE
MARGINS Workshop on the Izu-Bonin-Mariana Subduction System in
Honolulu, Hawaii, September 8-12, 2002 is now open for applications.
More information on the Meetings page.
March 19th, 2002: On
February 27th, the web master of this web site was hit by a car
when biking to work, resulting in among other a fractured leg.
However, yours truly is now back, and will resume the activities
on this news page. Please check back for updates in the near
future.
March 13-14th, 2002: The
MARGINS Steering Committee met at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
Highlights from the meeting will be pubished in the upcoming
issue of the newsletter.
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February 2002
February 13th, 2002: MARGINS-related
NSF award data is now available on this web site. The second
part of the award database for NSF-funded MARGINS-related proposals
can be accessed either directly via this
link or from the Related Documents
page. Related projects awards will be posted in the near
future.
February 7th, 2002: MARGINS-NSF
award data is now available on this web site. The first
part of the award database for NSF-funded MARGINS proposals
is now available either directly via this
link or from the Related Documents
page. A complete set with MARGINS-related and other related
projects awards will be posted in the near future.
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January 2002
January 18th, 2002: IMPORTANT! The
problem with Netscape 4.x browsers and the MARGINS web site has
now been taken care of, and the web site should work properly
for all browsers from version 4 and up. However, Netscape 4.x
handles layers in a different way than other browsers, which
necessitates maintaining an alternative mirror site, specially
coded for this browser version. If you use Netscape 4.x and
have links directly to any pages within the web site, you will
need to update them! If you don't have any direct links,
you shouldn't notice any changes (except possibly that some problems
have disappeared). Another method is to update to either the
current version of Netscape (6.2),
or use a recent version of MS
Internet Explorer, both downloadable for free.
January 9th, 2002: The MARGINS
Post-doctoral Fellowship Program has been released
and published on the web site. The document can be downloaded
as a PDF file, too.
January 8th, 2002: The MARGINS
Data Policy has been published on the web site. Please
read this important document carefully. A database section
of this web site, allowing input and retrieval of data, will
be operational soon (it's launching will be announced on
the mailing list and on this page).
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