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Chapter 5. Solid-Earth Sciences

Interdisciplinary Centers and Related Efforts

Of the five Centers that have been created in CIRES as a means of promoting interdepartmental, interdisciplinary efforts in specialized subjects, two are strong contributors to the solid-earth capabilities. One of these is the Center for the Study of Earth from Space, founded in 1985 and presented in detail in chapter six.

C4. The second is the Colorado Center for Chaos and Complexity (C4), organized in 1996. C4 was conceived and brought into existence by John Rundle and Vijay Gupta. Although rooted originally in earthquake physics and river network scaling, it has developed a broad membership, with members from 14 university departments and three units of NOAA. In addition to the expected participation by physicists, chemists, climate specialists, mathematicians, and computer scientists, the membership includes faculty members from political science, nursing, business, and kinesiology. The core of the approaches of C4 is recognition that the behavior and evolution of a complex system depends in essential ways on the interaction of the component parts and cannot be understood by studying each of the parts in isolation. The mission statement reads: "The Colorado Center for Chaos and Complexity will support interdisciplinary education and research, focusing on nonlinear problems that demonstrate complex behavior from simple systems, and simple behavior from complex systems." Computer simulation of complex systems is a basic tool of the research.

Examples of the broad problem areas within which C4 supports education and research, taken from the 1998 Advisory Board Review materials, are:

• Nonlinear simulations of problems in the earth and environmental sciences, including earthquakes, river networks, and general circulation models;
• Biological systems, including neural networks and RNA protein folding;
• Chaotic interactions of energetic particle systems;
• Prediction and control of chaotic systems;
• Physics of computation, pattern recognition, and pattern formation;
• Nonequilibrium threshold systems, including: sandpiles, granular materials, and magnetic depinning transitions (neural networks and earthquakes are also examples);
• Dynamics of evolution on rough energy or fitness landscapes, particularly in association with populations of individuals/agents and for systems described above.

Other Interdisciplinary Efforts. From the mid-1970s on, CIRES personnel have engaged in productive interactions with colleagues in other research institutes and in several academic departments. Such multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary activity depended initially on the interests of individual fellows, but have become formally encouraged and organized. The earliest efforts stemmed from the recognition that, although CIRES had decided at its founding to exclude public policy and social science studies from its scope, these subjects were essential to the solution of societal problems. Collaboration with other institutes and academic departments with expertise in appropriate areas was mandatory for a complete, integrated effort.

When research on the prediction of earthquakes became an organized federal effort in 1974, the Natural Hazards Research Center of the Institute of Behavioral Sciences, headed by Gilbert White, came to CIRES for input on how this research might bear on the work of IBS on the mitigation of earthquake hazards. Kisslinger and Wyss were the principal CIRES participants in a number of IBS-sponsored workshops and conferences. Eventually these discussions broadened to include also meteorological and hydrological hazards. In return for their efforts to inject information on the natural science aspects of extreme events, including the deficiencies of knowledge in many cases, CIRES scientists gained an appreciation of the needs of the ultimate users of their research in the practical world of preparing for and responding to natural disasters. Interactions with what is now called the Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center, led by Dennis Mileti, who succeeded Gilbert White, have continued.

CIRES geophysicists also have enjoyed "internal" collaboration with fellows from other disciplines. One example stemmed from the discovery by a Japanese chemist that the soil over a fault that has ruptured within the past 1,000 years or so contained a higher concentration of hydrogen gas than the normal values. As the identification of apparently inactive faults that have ruptured in recent geologic time is an important quest, CIRES geophysicists, led by Max Wyss, teamed with CIRES analytical chemists to test the idea. The test case was an active fault in Idaho that had produced a very strong earthquake in 1983. Although the field test yielded a negative result, itself scientifically significant, this collaboration opened new avenues for interdisciplinary efforts.

Hartmut Spetzler has been a leader in building bridges between his laboratory of rock physics and other disciplines, especially chemistry and some engineering fields. Among other topics, the cooperative work has included wave attenuation in rocks and the detection of fluids in porous rocks, as well as some early tests of the failed hypothesis of cold fusion.

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