 Good afternoon and welcome to the GSA Town Hall on the report of vision for NSF Earth Sciences 2020-2030, Earth in Time, which was released in May. For those of you not familiar with the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, we are a private nonprofit institution that provides independent objective analysis and advice to the U.S. to solve complex problems and to inform public policy decisions related to science. A few reminders for the audience. For today's Town Hall, we will provide a short presentation on the Earth in Time report, which will be followed by comments on relevant activities from some of our GSA division leaders. After that, we'll open it up for discussion amongst all participants. We welcome your comments. Please use the raise hand feature for comments so that we can call on you and ask you to unmute. We can also put comments or questions into the chat. We will be monitoring that as well. Before we begin, I'd like to introduce a few terms we'll be using. NSF is the National Science Foundation. GEO is the Directorate for GEO Sciences, one of seven directorates within NSF. There are four divisions within the GEO Directorate, covering ocean sciences, atmospheric and geospace sciences, polar programs, and the focus of this committee, Earth Sciences, EAR. EAR asked the National Academies to develop a vision for Earth Sciences in the coming decade. The committee organized by the academies was charged with three tasks. First, to identify a concise set of high priority science questions to advance Earth Science research. Second, to assess Earth Science infrastructure, including current infrastructure and future needs. Third, to discuss partnerships with other agencies within and beyond NSF that could maximize EAR's ability to address the priority questions. In addition, the academies convened a workshop to address future management models for geodetic and seismological capabilities. For each requested study, committee members are chosen for their expertise and they serve pro bono to carry out the study statement of task. The report that results from the study represents the consensus view of the committee and must undergo external peer review before it is released, as did this report. The committee reflected a breadth of expertise in Earth Sciences, including physical, chemical and biological perspectives, focus on the Earth's interior, surface processes and climate, and laboratory, computational and field based approaches. George Garals and Donna Whitney will present the report findings today. Others such as our Chair Jim Yoder and many other committee members who have joined the meeting are happy to participate in the open discussion after the GSA representatives. I'll pass it to Donna to discuss more about the report. In the report, we highlight the fact that Earth is a system, of course, and that there are many important processes that cross what NSF or EAR could be administrative boundaries. And it's really important that EAR continue its important work of enhancing research as an integrated system so that administrative barriers don't get in the way of important research that crosses these boundaries. We also, in the report, really highlight the urgency of this moment and for the foreseeable future. We call it an all hands on deck moment to also emphasize the fact that we need everybody. We need diverse inclusive groups working in many different ways that optimize creativity and impact of the research and education. And then of course this is inextricably related to the infrastructure that we use and the methods that we use. And so all of this needs to be considered in terms of who's an earth scientist, you know, how do we do earth science and what do we need in the decade to come. On the next slide, we have an introduction that will lead to the science priority questions that you saw as part of our statement of task. We know that integrating themes of these priorities that we identify in the report relate to Earth as a system that the interconnectedness of deep and shallow of deep time and the present and thinking about the future. All the technological advances that we need in terms of measurements and modeling. And I'll go along with that in terms of data. And, you know, earth sciences, in terms of EAR a lot of it is fundamental earth science research basic research, but they're there's societal relevance to too much of what we do. And so again that that relates to the urgency of this moment. I highlight also that the key insights will come from strong disciplinary research programs. And, you know, we're about to look at the 12 questions that we came up with but a really important point is that that these are just representative that there will be participated discoveries that that may be incredibly important to what we do in the next decade. So in the next slide we have our, our 12 questions that was part of our result of our statement of task and note that we were asked to come up with questions, not not just themes as in previous decadal surveys. So we, these are organized, as you can see from the core to the clouds with examples from many different aspects of the earth systems, and highlighting some some of the key questions that we think need further study and are poised for transformation in the next decade. And I don't know if you've looked at these yet but of course some of them look deceptively simple, you know what is an earthquake, but I hope that yeah you'll see that some of these really are interesting in terms of what they imply about what we've learned in the last decade or so, and what we're poised to do in the next decade. And so these are quite diverse questions that touch many of us in earth sciences. So we hope, we hope as a committee that will lead to a lot of discussion and creativity in the coming decade. Now George, Carol, so we'll present the rest. Okay, so thank you very much so we addressed the facilities and infrastructure component of the report, pretty much following the task we call we had three task components we were to identify the needed infrastructure to it that's needed to address the questions and we did that within the science questions. And then we are asked to evaluate the existing infrastructure that supported by EAR, and then to analyze the capability gaps what future infrastructure would be needed to address the science priority questions. So we found that we are able to do a good job of describing the infrastructure that exists the different facilities and the whole portfolio of infrastructure but we found it difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of the infrastructure, especially kind of top down broader view, how effective is the infrastructure in being able to address the science priority questions and so we offer this as one of our first recommendations, which is that EAR supported facilities and the entire portfolio of EAR supported infrastructure should be regularly evaluated using stated criteria. It should be helpful to prioritize future investments to perhaps sunset facilities as needed, and to adapt to changing science priorities. So next slide please. And so these are the recommendations that we have come up with in the report and we should point out two different things before jumping into these one is that all of these recommendations these initiatives come from white papers from workshops and reports that have been assembled, mainly during the past decade, and that we we list these recommendations not so much in terms of priority or importance, not not at all. What we're trying to do is just show the degree to which the community or the initiative is ready to go. And so our top left ones there those three we would view those as being shovel ready. These would include NSF support for a national consortium 4G or chronology, a very large multi anvil press community facility and a near surface geophysics center. We also suggest that EAR should support continued community development of the SSZ4D initiative. And then moving down the list EAR should encourage the community to explore a continental critical zone initiative, and a continental scientific drilling initiative. And then EAR should facilitate a community working group to develop the mechanisms for archiving and curation of currently existing and future physical samples, and for funding such efforts and this last one is one that we heard a lot about on the community input survey as being a critical need within many earth science departments in the country just unable to to handle the need to do this. We offer two recommendations with respect to cyber infrastructure and we also received a lot of community input about the need for EAR to address these possibilities so EAR should initiate a community based standing committee to address EAR regarding cyber infrastructure needs and advances and EAR should develop and implement a strategy to provide for fair practices within community based data efforts. And next slide please. So perhaps slightly different from has what has been done in the past we we we view human infrastructure as an essential component for what it takes to do cutting edge earth science research. And we offer these two recommendations that EAR should commit to long term funding that develops and sustains technical staff capability stability and competitiveness and this is one we also heard a lot about in community input survey. And at the bottom but by no means lower priority in fact this is one that really threads through all of our, all of our science questions recommendations and partnerships is that EAR should enhance its existing efforts to provide leadership, investment and centralized guidance to improve diversity, equity and inclusion within the earth science community. Okay, and some final thoughts is to mention again that we, we consider the EAR mission is more critical than ever. It's a very urgent time in earth sciences, and that the priority questions that we, we propose based a lot on community input. We think illustrate the significance breadth and magnitude of the challenges and opportunities for research from 2020 to 2030. And that implementing these recommendations including the infrastructure recommendations that George just mentioned isn't just about a commitment of funding though of course that's very important, but really thinking about how we do things. And again this gets back to the question of who's an earth scientist what is an earth scientist and so on. We already does as a leader in many ways in investigating the earth as a system with the interconnectedness of different spheres. And we think it's that we're in a really good position to poise next decade of innovative research, and we hope that this report will, will help guide conversations about about what to do next. Next slide. So, we've invited representatives from GSA divisions to talk briefly two minutes each about how their division activities might connect to some of the themes of the report, and we hope that this will help lead into a broader discussion. So we appreciate the time for these representatives of these divisions, and we thank them in advance for for what they're about to contribute to start with Jim Russell from the continental drilling division. Hello, thanks for asking us to do this and for organizing it. Thanks to all of the committee members for all the efforts and putting that document together it was really energizing to read it in many ways so I think the continental scientific drilling division is a, is a relatively new division we've we're in our third year as a division now. And what we do is try to provide an intellectual hub for scientists who are exploring the Earth's continental crust. The continental scientific drilling is really more of a tool than a science, but that tool promotes a really, really diverse array of observations and ways to answer a really diverse set of questions so certainly scientific drilling projects investigate the Earth's climatic biological and biogeochemical evolution. We, we promote science investigating subsurface life and chemical cycles volcanic processes earthquake processes so. So a lot of the questions that are really, you know, really well expressed in the in the earth and time report or things that are promoted by by drilling. Also, we try to provide opportunities for sessions networking events we we have distinguished lectureships we we fund student research projects on these topics. Obviously an area we'd like to see follow up on is this recommendation that he or should encourage the community to explore a CSD initiative. We've had a number of meetings over probably the last decade about what such an initiative might, might look like. And over the summer we organized another workshop and now some members of the division as well as people outside the division have organized a sort of a task force to kind of think about what that objective and initiative might might look like. So that's sort of where we are and what we're doing. Okay, thank you while we're waiting for Donna to unmute. Maybe I'll. There we go Donna. Yeah, I think we'll just go to the next one though right and we'll we'll have the different reports and then and then discuss so there's Juliet Krider from GSA structural geology and tectonics division. Yes, thanks everybody and thanks for the invitation to participate in this panel. I'm Juliet Krider, and I represent the structural geology and tectonics division of GSA. We, our organization is celebrating our 40th anniversary this year, and I say our members are engaged in almost all of the priority research questions listed in this document so we represent a diverse selection of research interests in this and I think that the most important thing I'd like to say today is that the facilities instrumentation and infrastructure investments are really essential to keep our science moving forward. So some of the things that we're doing at this meeting include a linked series of link disciplinary sessions today and tomorrow on the SC 4D community initiative, building a vision and a plan for investigating the systems in space and time, followed the at the end of tomorrow by a town hall meeting in which we will solicit community input and important earth and time themes in this effort include cross geo partnerships with oceans and atmosphere. As we're looking at crossing the land sea boundary the solid earth and the atmosphere boundaries to to understand the evolution of subduction zones will need geochronology topography material characterization geophysics and data management tools to be successful in this endeavor. Another community initiative that's come out this year is the rapid response to pandemic restrictions in terms of conducting traditional field geology instruction online. There was a tremendous need and a tremendous community effort of the last six months to make this possible. And the results of that effort can be seen in sessions yesterday and today about how the problem was solved. Important earth and times themes here are cyber infrastructure, but also very importantly human infrastructure and equity and inclusion in in field geology training. We have nearly 90 technical sessions and other events at GSA this year, and our priorities in general are supporting the breadth and diversity of structural geology and tectonics research, but also increasing the diversity of structural geology and tectonics researchers. So a few things we'd like to see have a conversation about and follow up is ensuring that there is continued access to these major national facilities by individual PIs and students and maybe thinking about how to lower the barriers to access for those to those research facilities. We'd like the Earthscope ages model where individual students could apply for a small amount of funds to work at a different institution at a geochronology lab. We also think that continued training and professional development for researchers at all career stages is important to enable us to make the most rapid advances possible. So, that would be something interesting to talk for us to talk about. And finally, the tectonic community put a big effort into a major planning and visioning document just a few years ago that should say 2018. And we're still synthesizing and digesting the cores report, but it'd be interesting to talk about how this new report maps on to the priorities that our community has established. Thank you. Thank you, Juliet. Very thoughtful analysis and information. So now we'll hear from Jason Polk the chair of the cars division. Hi everyone I'm Jason Polk chair of the cars division is as she just mentioned and I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you a little bit about our division and what we're doing. We're fairly new division. We've really been only around since 2014. And if continue to grow and evolve. It's really exciting to see the report and to identify some of the areas in which we really are are moving as a science and as a discipline and able to contribute and interact more. Really, the top of the corner kind of just highlighted, because there were so many different areas that it looks like more than half the questions posed in there, the report we easily can fit into and possibly more for sure. And just to highlight some of the things we're having a new frontier session this this conference that actually highlighted a few of these really initiatives and priorities that overlap well with the report and some of the priorities that are moving forward so for those right now I highlighted a couple critical zone processes right now we actually have an asset funded carbonate critical zone project through a couple of folks in division. It's a five year project that's basically to create cooperation network for this this carbonate critical zone effort to look at groundwater surface water interactions to microbial processes monitoring resource management etc. In these landscapes. So really for our division anything with caves, groundwater sinkholes, those types of landscape features are really the primary aspects so the critical zone component really fits a lot of the work that we do from the subsurface to the surface. And a couple other areas the biogeochemical cycling and geological processes affecting biodiversity, another big area outside of the physical geologic aspects that we have we also do a lot in the interdisciplinary realm of things related to to biogeochemistry, things like pathogens research everything from harmful aspects like coronavirus potentially from bats in caves and spreading out to humans but also helpful things like antibiotics and looking into microbial communities, endemic species and evolution, and even planetary cars investigations that sort of fit into that realm and lots of others as well so really see some interesting overlap and efforts in that area. The third one is hydrologic cycle under changing climate. We obviously again focusing a lot on groundwater and major aquifers that are useful for for groundwater withdrawal for many different types of communities and populations around the world. That's a huge piece of what we look at both from a quantity and a quality aspect, everything from drought and flood impacts on these aquifers to access and availability of water. And especially as we see a changing climate, some of the areas we know are most vulnerable will be the ones that that are in cars regions where we will see those impacts be exacerbated on those communities. Earth dynamic climate is another one that fits in well with a lot of up and coming work that's being done using cave deposits to reconstruct climate. This has come a long way in the last few decades using mineral formations and sediments in caves to go back and reconstruct climate at a high resolution for decades the centuries to millennia, and how that impacts everything from groundwater availability time back to the hydrologic cycle to predicting things like hurricane cyclicity and other work that's being done so that's become a really established cornerstone of our discipline in our field and some some great presentations on how that's advancing. And then the geohazards reduction is another one that kind of overlaps with some of the more physical hazards aspects of our discipline so singles and the occurrence of those under a changing climate under under some of the recent changes we've seen in the hydrologic cycle. Groundwater contamination and monitoring and tracking as we see those become more prevalent when we have increased flooding and just population growth and change. So throughout all those different initiatives, they certainly overlap a lot with the vision initiatives and things that we see as priorities for our discipline. On the other side for report aspects we'd like to see follow up some of the things that we see here in the report that work well with with what we currently have as priorities but also maybe some additional focus would be our EAR lab support for critical zone and water cycle processes. We see a lot of efforts in areas that kind of overlap but specifically in those those two fields there's a lot of need for instrumentation. There's a lot of recent advancements in the last decade of instrumentation and the way that we can actually conduct our research so having more support infrastructure for those would be really helpful. The linear surface geophysics center certainly fits well with our need for better instrumentation capabilities for mapping subsurface geologic hazards, flow path mapping that sort of thing. So that's an exciting initiative that certainly I can see benefit for discipline, but continental critical zone, you know, relapse well with with the effort we already have underway for this project from some of our colleagues. There's a huge portion of the ice free land surfaces karst and so we actually are studying a pretty vast amount of the critical zone across multiple continents in different areas. So certainly that initiative and support for that across all different areas would be useful. And then the earth archives I thought was interesting, specifically for our discipline because we actually do have a lot of unarchived information that it's becoming better sorted and organized as the discipline grows. It includes everything from new discovered minerals and microbes to even just map surface subsurface passages that are maybe not well archived or managed or available at a national level and trying to do larger scale work looking beyond just a local local region or beyond the US. The last two items are really just a sort of broader scopes capabilities, things like big data. We're generating now very large data sets related back to everything from Paleo climate archives to water, anything hydrologic data water quality water quality data, moving into modeling, using neural machine learning. So a lot of different data sets being being generated and the ability to process and analyze these would be really useful as we move forward and some unique application specifically things like groundwater modeling which is traditionally incredibly difficult and these types of environments. They really does require sort of new innovative techniques and the reliance on computing power and the ability to actually go through and process these large data sets in certain ways that are a little bit different than there may be other ways and other sciences. And the last one is just a great effort I see across this report and across the current initiative being put forth by NSF to be more in this plenary and collaborate within NSF directorates and outside into other other areas of the government other entities, because in our discipline that's certainly a priority. You can see through some of these listed priorities we obviously connect together and work with lots of other disciplines from anthropology to biology to archaeology and beyond to really be able to conduct our research and and bring it all together. So we'd like to see that and with that one of the key initiatives has improved communication education really a lot of leaps in the last few years and certainly efforts to to improve diversity inclusion education and communication about all of the different priorities we have that affect communities and people that help initiate new projects and help our science advance certainly are all things that we'd appreciate support on and being able to contribute to as we move forward. Thank you. Yeah, that was very interesting with lots of priorities and ideas. So next is Alan Rooney from the Geochronology division. Thanks very much. So my name is Alan Rooney and I'm the incoming chair for the Geochronology division. So my board members at the bottom of the slide and a number of them also on the call. So we're a new division, and Liam Oregon, Julie Fozdeck, George girls and myself, this vision together about three years ago. We're up to over 500 members and our members, they include both consumers as well as producers of Geochronology data. So the priorities and research groups are targeting questions across high temperature, low temperature, short and very long time scales. And we look at questions concerned with the DPF and all the way through to near surface processes. And so it's a very broad research group. And in the last year, we have a dedicated DEI coordinator, Nicole Aitken, who came on the board and has made great strides and increasing diversity, equity and inclusion. Start initiatives with regards to these points to the sort of greater facility accessibility and the Geochronology and the Geosciences or Earth Sciences. And this is the GSA level as well as within the division level and something we're very keen to push forward on. And then at our town hall during this meeting, we started a conversation with our members and other groups with regards to a potential Geochronology consortium, which is recommended in the Earth and Time report. And so we're starting to put the conversations together and starting workshops to try and understand the sort of directions and the structure and the questions that would go towards that Geochronology consortium. And so we feel that together, these three items highlight a really strong commitment to all of the questions outlined in the report as well as the initiatives that are driving forward from today. And we're particularly excited to working towards enhancing community connections and that will help expand lab and technique accessibility. This is critical, and we believe in sort of establishing community connections that would help drive both technique development as well as education and equity and Geochronology as well as other components of the Earth Sciences. And so as I said, other board members are on the call and we'll have to take any conversation questions and just want to say thank you very much for the opportunity to contribute here. Great. Thank you very much for that. Okay, now we'll hear from, I think, Julie Brigham-Gretze about Quaternary Geology and Geomorphology. Yes, thanks a lot and thank you very much for a fabulous report. I want to edit my slide here. First off, as that all 12 of the driving questions are really important within the division of Quaternary Geology and Geomorphology. And I'm here today as the incoming president to the division and also on the call is Missy Epps, who is the outgoing president of the division. I think one of the important things about all of the driving questions is that these driving questions cut across all aspects of the geosciences but certainly within this Quaternary division really lies at the interface of how humans interact with this landscape that we live on and how we use it, whether it's for agriculture, whether it's looking at sea level rise. All of the various aspects of how humans impact the earth and how we need to be more sustainable are really captured really across almost all 12 of these aspects and involve the surface processes in geomorphology and the past history so that we can learn how whether it's in the deserts or when the or in the Arctic, we can learn about how these processes acted in the past and how they may be influenced by human activity. So I was thinking, we could almost take every single one of these 12 issues. And, for example, what what are the causes and consequences of topographic change and its impact on society for example, looking at racial isostatic adjustments versus dynamic topography brings together sea level history coastal management, coastal processes, even involving solid earth processes. So we cut across all of these various disciplines and I think you could do. I can give you an example of that across all of the 12 elements that are shown here. So we also like the fact that a lot of the ideas that are brought together are not only just discovery science but what we would like to call actionable science. And this is where we bring what we can do to improve the human element on our landscape and provide more sustainability and integrating actionable science that's policy relevant. It really comes out in the report, at least in my opinion. And I think those of us working on surface processes and paleo climate would certainly see that this is really relevant as we continue to warm up the planet. Other relevant issues initiatives that are outlined in the report are all consistent with the needs and activities of the division. Whether it's critical zone that's, that's where we are the surfacial geology continental drilling is important also for past climates and hazards. We also are really pushing also on this fair data idea. This is also important whether it's starring data and making available but also providing storage for samples and archiving so these various facilities that store our materials are really important and need to be funded. Sustainable technical staff is really important. I think we lag behind other countries in trying to maintain the technical staff that we have that's becoming more challenging. And I have the last point here is just maintaining an outward leaning collaborations with international partners. That was not quite as clear in that a report there's a lot of really good material about interacting across agencies in the federal government, but it's really important to do that we just recently signed an agreement with the International Association of geomorphologists to link with other countries. And the other last thing I wanted to just comment on is we in the Contemporary Division are launching a very actionable set of changes we'd like to make in our division to increase what's called Jedi the justice equity diversity and inclusion across our division and so we're going to implement real change in our bylaws to make sure that we can set an example for other other divisions. So thank you very much. Thank you. And I think for the last one will hear from reto Gary and geology and health division. Hello everyone and thank you for the opportunity to speak here in this town hall. I'm representing the geology and health division of the GSA. This is a fairly small division. So we really welcome this report, because it contains so much important information that is fundamental to our area. We are basing our research on the three overarching themes, but particular active in the third one that studies the influence and human human systems and human society. So we use the fundamental earth science research and look at the societal relevance. We have primarily right now are trying to build our base by being active in organizing sessions at GSA. It's a young field very rapidly growing field. So to find out what are the implications of environmental contamination and so what we do is go beyond documenting contaminants being water, soil or the air as well, and going beyond trying to figure out where these contaminants are coming from, but really looking at what are they doing to our bodies. And so that's our main activities. We had a short course at this GSA meeting that was shared by some of our members. Generally on the earth impact and human health, and then some specific sessions and you see from the different session topics that we really are interested in these contaminants and they how they affect various parts of our body, but not just individually but also in terms of the public. So public health is equally at the core of our research. If you think for example of lead pollution. This is a tremendous issue in many cities around the world, and in many particularly in the US. And it's not just the lead drinking water lines we have a lot of pollution in the soil as well in the atmosphere. And so it's the exposure is an issue but also health risk and what can we do about it so we try to come up with policy to help reducing risks in all these different areas of research. And one session highlighted down there T 209. The dose makes the poison a very old saying, this is really important and we are looking at this issue by collaborating with medical doctors because we are trying to do to find out what are the consequences of increasing doses of certain chemicals in the environment. We need the help of organic chemists so it's not just geologists that do that work, but in particular all the exposure experiments have to be done by medical professionals. So in the laboratory in vitro, sometimes in vivo. So we couldn't do that without the medical professionals. And finally more general themes like environment geochemistry and health, and the global health, which is tightly connected to public health as well. So what we really would like to follow up is, how can, how can we partner with other federal agencies. We're really at the, at the far end of the geosciences with one foot in the medical sciences. And it's hard to find, not only journals to to publish our research but also get funding. The, on the medical side there are some important programs, perhaps you have heard of the Superfund Research Program in NIHS. This is a tremendous opportunity where these these proposals all need environmental projects in there, minimum two. So that's the way how we can tag into the medical sciences and get fairly large grants. So this is one of our top priorities, how can we partner with other federal agencies, in particular, those that are dealing with medical issues. Thank you very much for putting this town all together. And I'm excited to be here and answer any questions if you have any. Thank you so much for that summary and discussion of priorities. So I thank all of the division representatives who, who gave talks. And I think between the report and all what you presented there's there's lots to discuss. I think I'll turn it over to Deb Glickson to manage the discussion. Absolutely, and I echo those things and I apologize for the hundreds of emails that you got in the last two weeks. Welcome to working on a committee with me. So, I see we already have one question so I'm going to mention that. The question is that you'll get a little thing that asks you to unmute and on and or to turn on your video so let's start with Ross Henderson. So there might be a little delay. Hi, can you hear me. Oh, sorry. Yeah. So I have a question I guess to all the nascent committee, and it has to do with distributed acoustic sensing, which I believe is a NSF program in the in their grand challenge, maybe in phase one, but okay so this is two part question. Is that part of EAR. And then I have a follow up. So it's, it's about this. Yeah, stats. I'm looking around to see if there are any hands from our or anybody from our committee wants to unmute. Maybe let's hear your second half of your question has that. Okay, so maybe Dr. Polk already answered this. Sorry, trying to do several things. So, maybe. But my question is about aquaculture. So the GSA karst division. I understand is involved with hydraulics and underground water aquifers and things like this and flow path mapping. However, it seems that it's directed only to underground. Earth water. So what about offshore even. So not seismic not geodesic, not really volcanic, but sea level and this has to do with 3D DS, which is very, very relatively new. Because as you probably all know, that's is a fiber based and it's shovel ready. So this is my follow up. Great. My aquaculture sorry. All right, thank you. So, maybe we'll ask, Jason, do you want to see, do you want to respond or Michael. I see a hand raised from Michael and I know that this was directed towards Jason Polk. Sure, I'm happy to I think I understand your question, although I'm not maybe sure I can answer it perfectly. Based on what I do know but yeah we do a lot of different work looking at subsurface water and mapping flow paths and different types of interactions that include coastal interactions, you know, including, you know, springs that underwater that may come out under under different areas, you know, engulfs or bays or shores. And so there's a lot of different techniques there there everything from seismic techniques to more traditional, you know, underwater mapping using tracers and that sort of thing. I don't know that we have used there's a lot of work being done area that you're describing for full we actually use it for an artist plan right now. But I certainly see there could be opportunities and potentially other things that are out there that people are working on that I'm just not familiar with. My colleagues here can speak to it feel free to jump in. I'm not sure I think there's a few of them on here. So, yeah, so, so thank you very much. And this is another follow up about with underground aquifers in the Great Lakes are you are you looking at the Great Lakes, besides just the continental. I think there may be some people doing some work on those. But it's, most of our work is on specific types of aquifers that are obviously a little bit different so so porous media aquifers and those types of things are not settings that we typically are doing as much on in our discipline, even though we draw from that from from hydrogeology and discipline itself so we're doing obviously more conduit mapping and more turbulent flow mapping and aquifer settings and things for for some of these larger regional aquifers but we do have diffuse flow and other other settings and it's a little bit more complicated I think and how we might be approached that. And then those types of settings, as far as water underneath water. It's kind of what you're describing. So, yeah, yeah. Okay, great. I think I think we should stand. Sorry. Okay, underneath the desert to it. Why don't we move on to the next question or why don't we actually I think Michael foot has his hand raised so why don't we go to him. Thank you. Yeah, I guess. I'm not sure I fully understood the context of the question but in terms of the report rather than the breadth of what's going on in geoscience research. I'm going to put a emphasis on all aspects of the hydrologic cycle. So, I guess the simple answer to the initial question is, you know, yes, this is the, the full spectrum of what water does on the planet from the mantle up to the upper surface is something of interest. Great. Thank you. All right, I see. Oh, shaman do you want to respond to that. If not I have a comment from Jim Russell. Jim and you muted yourself again. Okay, yeah, I just wanted to quickly respond that I think offshore surface is part of the water cycle that I think we broadly talked about in the report. I think it is definitely part of the larger picture of the water cycle whether it's offshore or on the continent I don't think we are particularly close to the continent offshore coastal regions, and it's definitely very relevant to understanding of the water cycle dynamics. Great, thank you. We question or comment from Jim Russell and then I have a question from the chat. Yeah, hi. I guess I was curious just from the perspective of the committee members maybe how best. How best can we help to kind of engage in and carry out some of the, some of the activities and, you know, suggestions that are that are identified in the report. You know, we're engaged in a lot of the scientific questions as well as, you know, in my case some of the suggestions for, you know, development of facilities and things but I'm just kind of curious what what you, you know, what you would recommend the kind of the next, the next steps in that engagement like might look like what the, you know, what the, yeah, how you envision the next, you know, a couple of years I don't know. I hope I'm not being very clear but I hope you get the gist of the question. It's a good question and I there it actually more committee members than I had expected so I'm going to wait to see if anybody wants to either raise their hand or just jump right in and answer it. So come on. Jim. Jim you'll get a little button that's asked you to unmute. All right. Well I think if I understood the question I NSF response and proposal so if you think you've got something to contribute to those themes I know some sort of proposal with us for a workshop or a science program would be the way to contribute I if I understood the question properly. Yeah, that's the kind of thing I was I was wondering about sort of what, you know, I don't know if divisions can write. Well, divisions cannot probably write proposals but we can certainly write proposals as individuals. Yeah, utilize to the divisions to, you know, to kind of think about scoping and things like this for you know holding sessions that your meetings is also a way that you're drawing attention to the issue issues. Great. Looks like Kate and then Michael want to join in on this one. I think thanks everyone for this interesting discussion so far. Your question, I think is a great one and I was really impressed by how the division leaders here on have have sort of tried to try to communicate how they envision themselves. You know, what are the constituencies fitting into the science party questions, and it occurs to me that the that, you know, your groups are really great places for community to engage, and, and, you know, come up with their own ideas of what resonates most with them and how they, you know, to make those tasks and it doesn't need to be just only in science proposals. It seems like NSF is asking for comments and, and engagement and so I think exactly what you're doing seems to me like like fantastic ways to engage and make the next steps forward leadership role yours are ourselves yourselves in in seeing what what it is that the community wants, but I'm very inspired by the kinds of ways that people have already articulated the connections they see in the ways they see themselves getting into the priority questions and the infrastructure needs and so those conversations the science sessions, and then, you know, those sorts of things can then catalyze activities with individual p is that would then ask for funding or larger consortia to come up with working groups and, you know, those, not forgetting the name of them but the, oh, you know what they're called those, those work, those workshop things that that they fund doing sorry to end on an unarticulate note. Thanks. Great thanks Kate. And I have two questions from the chat but I'm going to also just I'm going to put in a disclaimer to these questions which is, please remember that the committee members who wrote the report. Don't actually work for NSF so they can't answer questions about what NSF is doing. So I'll ask the questions but I'm not sure what kind of response we might get. So, one question from Corey black eagle is he'd like to know what, or she I'm sorry I should say they would like to know what efforts are underway to integrate the existing and completed critical zone programs to the ongoing critical continental critical zone initiative. Well, that one. So it's what efforts are underway to integrate the existing and completed critical zone programs to the ongoing continental critical zone initiative. Oh, Michael's going to take a stab. Oh, I'm, I guess I would say so first of, I mean, this is really a riff on what Deb just said about, you know, that we're not NSF we are, we're, you know, we made our recommendations to NSF. The critical zone initiative has not been adopted by NSF this was a recommendation from the committee. And so I think the simple answer is nothing has been done yet because we don't know if NSF is going to adopt that, adopt that recommendation and do anything about it. Does that sound reasonable Deb. That sounds reasonable to me and I think, unfortunately that. Oh, I'm sorry Corey would you like to follow up. Let's see can we unmute you. There we go. Just in there we go. Sure. My question is, I think that the critical zone is a crucial initiative and I applaud you for identifying it. I'm currently involved in the carbonate critical zone. Again, I know that within the quaternary geology division they were doing a critical zone. And I don't remember the name of it that has ended. There have been other critical zone programs out there. And so in the initiative I think part of what needs to be done is to pull all of those together, as well as move forward with additional research. But it wasn't necessarily a what are you going to do about it so much as a is there a way to think about pulling all that existing research together and moving forward with the continental critical zone initiative. I might suggest we leave that as an open question. There are definitely some folks from the National Science Foundation who are listening on the line so perhaps it's a good thing for them to hear how, unless anybody else wants to respond to that. I have another question in the chat that again is kind of the same flavor so I just want to make everyone aware of that. So how does NSF encourage interdisciplinary scientists to serve on panels or as reviewers within non interdisciplinary regular programs. So if interdisciplinary work can be overlapped overlooked due to lack of familiarity with jargon and the concepts that don't translate. How would you make sure that you know that there's a mechanism and I don't think anybody on the committee can really answer this question. But I might, I might throw it out there and it's from Missy Epps. Andrea. Can you hear me right from personal experience. You know oftentimes a proposal can be co reviewed. And so you'll get it co reviewed by another panel. And actually we talked to NSF about in your interdisciplinary research some during the progress of writing this report. And I know there's a perception in the community that if you get it co reviewed then you have less of a chance of getting it funded because now you have more panels reviewing it. The feedback that we got from the program officers was that that is not borne out by the data that they have on proposals that are co reviewed so it does not hurt your proposal. In that sense to identify the fact that it is interdisciplinary and it may need to be co reviewed and so, you know that's basically to be encouraged was the message that we got very helpful. So it's, it's five minutes till the end of the hour. And I know that people will rush off to the next thing but do we have any further questions or comments while we've got everyone on the line. A quiet group today. And maybe what I will do is direct you towards the chat where our report is available for pre free PDF download. And we do have hard copies. If we could ever get back into our offices we'd be happy to provide those to you as well. And I wanted to thank all of our committee members. Again, and I would like to really thank our GSA division representatives that was incredibly helpful. And I thank all of you for taking an hour out of your day during such a busy time to spend it with us and I hope that you have gained something from it. If you have any questions. I'm happy if my email, I'll throw my email in the chat in just a second. And, and I'm happy to relay any questions or concerns to the committee members. Thank you so much. Have a great day.