59th Annual Report on Research 2014

Our work plan for year 1 was to do field work and remote sensing geodesy in order to explore the active salt tectonics and surface processes across the western Kuqa fold-thrust belt of NW China. We have accomplished the core elements of this plan, having performed a field season in September 2013 and conducted InSAR image analysis (InSAR = interferometry of synthetic aperture radar). Some modifications to the original plan were required: the Kuqa region is part of the larger Xinjiang Province, which is increasingly restive (3 bombings in the capital Urumqi thus far in 2014), so we limited our field work to a 2.5 week field season. We were still able to accomplish most core field goals, but nonetheless we have correspondingly expanded the range of our InSAR investigations. Instead of the prior work focusing exclusively on the western Kuqa region, now we have performed analysis of this region and also of this region within a study of the larger Tian Shan region that extends further north. As a result, we will produce two InSAR publications and one field-based publication in the immediate future (our first related manuscript will be published in the GSA journal Geosphere in December, 2014). We also promised to develop research proposal concepts and are hard at work on a proposal to use combined geodetic and precipitation measurements (ground-based and space-based in both categories, in hopes that the political situation stabilizes) to explore the relationships of precipitation events to salt motion, as per the recommendation of proposal reviewer Christopher Talbot. Prof. Talbot has been a continuing source of support, ideas, and constructive criticism; we very much appreciate his feedback. The primary student on the proposal unexpectedly received TA support in the first project year, so we will use the remaining money to fund additional students and expand project scope during the final project year. We are now on track with a good undergraduate student (starting Sept 2014) and intend to support him with the undergraduate monies; we failed to find a useful student in the first year so will redouble these efforts and expenditures this year.