Defining research and educational priorities in Near-Surface Geophysics: a workshop and survey in light of the Vision for NSF 2020-2030 Earth in Time report

Human society, and all life of Earth, depends on Earth’s “near-surface” environment. The soils, water, ground water, microbes, and rock provide resources, allow construction, and shape local environments and their resilience. This is the locus of diverse natural hazards, such as landslides, volcanic hazards, earthquakes, and floods, and persistent soil and water pollution.

Geoscientists have recently developed a diverse range of techniques to probe and study this environment in increasing detail, to help understand it and improve responses to these hazards and challenges. There is huge potential benefit in integrating these approaches and standardizing and sharing broadly and collectively the diverse data and observations of these studies—both for advancing science questions and for immediate societal uses and benefits, for example in planning and resilience to climate change.

This proposal will survey the full near-surface research community and support a workshop to plan and develop this integration of approaches, data, and training for the future. This proposal will thus support a recommendation from the National Academies on future Earth science priorities for NSF outlined in the Earth-in Time consensus report.

High-priority questions about the shallow subsurface (or uppermost ~100 m) of the Earth, where lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere meet, could be addressed with integrated near- surface geophysics instrumentation, data, and training. We propose to survey diverse scientists and bring them together in a town hall discussion and virtual workshop series to create and disseminate such an inventory and plan for future integration of diverse approaches and data, including around training to address scientific targets as well as societal needs and challenges while stressing diversity and equity broadly.

The products of this work would help define the merits, and roadmap, of this integration, including the recommendation of the National Academies report Earth-in-Time for a near surface geophysical center to facilitate integrated near-surface studies. A goal of the workshop’s outcomes is to identify what the near-surface Earth Science community considers the highest-value scientific research targets as well as provide recommendations to improve education and outreach on near-surface geophysics topics to the geoscience community and related communities such as engineering and those involved in natural hazard mitigation.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.