The discussion will focus on the creation of a Subduction Zone Observatory (SZO) to enable research on all facets of subduction zone processes and facilitate a systems approach to a complex, inter-linked set of processes active at subduction zones including the incoming and overriding plates. A SZO would improve our understanding of the physical processes involved in a variety of natural hazards including earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and landslides. The observations would also be relevant to a number of grand challenges in Earth science, including fluid flux through the crust and mantle, geochemical processes in arcs, injection of water into the mantle, and deformation responses to megathrust earthquakes on times scales from seconds to millions of years and spatial scales from millimeters to thousands of kilometers. Our goals at this meeting are to discuss specific objectives for an SZO, identify potential international collaborators, target other geoscience communities with interests in SZO science, and to make progress towards a workshop in Fall 2015 to articulate the major science objectives and required facilities for a SZO. The workshop will consist of some initial framing remarks on different topics and plenty of time for group discussion. IRIS recently produced a notional SZO science targets and relevant infrastructure poster.
