So much has happened since I last wrote. It is very hard to know where to begin. There is bad news, good news, and, well, just news.

Let’s begin with the bad news. The SZ4D Center proposal was declined by NSF in April a few days before the Community Meeting. NSF clearly communicated that they had previously intended to fund the Center, but unexpected budgetary cuts to the GEO division made it impossible. This is obviously happening in a larger context. This Science piece makes some interesting reading that may or may not be related to the SZ4D specific situation.

The excellent work many of you did in pulling together the center plan was clearly appreciated by the reviewers, panel and program manager. At least one reviewer claimed that the SZ4D Center Proposal was the strongest proposal they had ever read, and there was an overall tone of awe in the reviews at the intricate web of data curation, lab experiments, field work, modeling and workforce development that culminated in predictive models. The key question is what can we do with all of that intellectual work and planning that moves the field forward? Parts of the proposal can be pushed forward by individuals through the NSF core programs or through partnerships with other scientific consortia. Facilitating these connections is a large part of the current efforts of the SZ4D Steering Committee. The MultiHazard Array planning is entirely independent of the Center and is continuing at an excellent pace. Other parts of the integrated vision will need to stay integrated under some other funding model.

So, now the good news. Over the last few months, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation requested and received from SZ4D a formal proposal to tackle volcanic eruption forecasting. The $2.2M SZ4D TEFRA (Testing Eruption Forecasting through Research and Assimilation) project plans to establish the first open, community-scale competition in volcanic eruption forecasting, designed to rigorously produce and evaluate competing approaches to eruption prediction using modern, open-access datasets. TEFRA would provide opportunities for research funding, community meetings, and interaction with volcano observatories that are intended as the end users of forecasting tools.  The competition structure capitalizes on SZ4D’s multihazard expertise to cross-fertilize prediction strategies and the proposal describes how teams that bring together insights from earthquakes, landscape and volcanic systems are likely to produce better results. As a private entity, the Moore Foundation is able to (enthusiastically) fund  international collaborators, can move quickly and is largely insulated from the NSF issues above. The invitation to submit followed an extensive process and is very, very good news.

And in more good news, the Gordon Research Conferences (GRC)  has approved a subduction zone focussed meeting. The GRC is an independent organization that runs moderate sized (~120-200 person) meetings that support a research community and keep a continuous conversation in a field. The conferences are held for a week in New England, and once approved, continue every other year in perpetuity, or at least as long as we have a research community interested in going. Given the enthusiasm and oversubscription for every single SZ4D meeting to date, I am pretty sure interest will not be a problem.  A huge congratulations and thanks to the leaders of this effort: Geoff Abers, Mark Behn, Cailey Condit and Kristin Morrell.

Finally, there is just news. About 150 of you were able to join us for the hugely successful SZ4D Community Meetingin Long Beach in April. At the meeting, an integrated view of subduction zone geohazards came to life with talks that brought insights from landscapes into earthquake tempos, advances in earthquake point process models into volcanic eruption prediction and advances in sediment transport into unraveling new volcanic landscapes. Representatives from the 14 SZNet networks across the world met in person (many for the first time) and discovered new synergies. The IMPACTS group of co-curricular staff pioneered an entirely new approach of bringing staff advisors together across universities to engage with researchers on practical paths towards workforce development.  GeoArray and Strabo co-led a field trip to Catalina Island after the meeting that introduced a digital environment for team-level field science, which has never existed before. It was an intellectually rich gathering that simply could not have happened before SZ4D set the agenda.

Thank you for bearing with this incredibly long letter. Thank you also for all of your dedicated effort and scientific commitment. Let’s keep the momentum going.

PS - There are just a couple more days to register as a host for the SZNet exchange program. Grab yourself an early career visitor and potential colleague for life!