60th Annual Report on Research 2015

Our original work plan for year 2 (Fall 2014 – Summer 2015) was to work on data interpretation, future proposals, and dissemination as part of our over-arching effort to explore the active salt tectonics and surface processes across the western Kuqa fold-thrust belt of NW China. Due to the political difficulties of field work in Xinjiang and the expansion of our interests in diapiric tectonics, our proposed approach for this year was expanded with approval of the program leadership to include (1) regional InSAR image analysis along a transect across the entire Tian Shan (InSAR = interferometry of synthetic aperture radar), (2) field work in a contrasting diapiric setting, the eastern Pilbara region of NW Australia. This modified plan was largely realized: throughout the year PhD student Cindy Colón led our InSAR data processing and interpretation efforts in collaboration with leading scientists from Cornell and Grenoble, and PI Webb and MS student Jiawei Zuo conducted the new diapiric tectonics field research in the summer of 2015. Proposal work has been somewhat stunted by circumstances (in Spring 2015 PI Webb moved to the University of Leeds, and then in Winter 2016 he moved again to the University of Hong Kong) but the bulk of plans are in place for submission of a diapiric tectonics proposal to the Hong Kong Research Grants Council in Fall 2016, and another future proposal on salt geodesy has also been mapped out. Dissemination is proceeding reasonably well: PhD student Colón has presented our research at an international InSAR meeting (the 2015 Fringe Workshop), and our field-based publication was published in Geosphere: Li, J.-H., Webb, A.A.G., Mao, X., Eckhoff, I., Colón, C., Zhang, K., Wang, H., Li, A., He, D., 2014, Active surface salt structures of the western Kuqa fold-thrust belt, northwestern China. Geosphere, v. 10, no. 6, p. 1219-1234. Our Chinese colleague Jianghai Li serves as first author on the paper in recognition of his introducing us to the field area and providing some early map files, but this publication is almost exclusively a result of grant activities: PI Webb wrote the manuscript and served as corresponding author, and he and all other authors collaborated to make the various figure files. A broad range of former and current Louisiana State U students contributed to the work, including undergraduate Ingrid Eckhoff and graduate students Colón, Kexin Zhang, An Li, and Dian He. Our first InSAR manuscript, concerned with the active deformation of the salt structures of Kuqa, was largely completed during year 2. It was submitted to Earth and Planetary Science Letters late in 2015 and received largely positive reviews. In a few days it will be resubmitted (in late April / early May 2016). Data processing on another InSAR manuscript, concerning a transect across the Tian Shan from the salt structures in the south to the northern limit of the range, is nearly completed. The technical challenges of InSAR interpretation across such mountainous terrain are immense, and the technical aspects of this contribution will be as useful to future work as the Earth science findings. Finally, PhD student Colón is considering a third InSAR contribution more strictly related to petroleum geoscience, concerning the subsidence and inflation seen in InSAR across a portion of the producing areas in the Kuqa gas giant.