ICDP/SCEC Workshop: Rapid Response Drilling of Faults: Past, Present and Future
Dates: November 17-19, 2008
Location: Tokyo, Japan

There are questions that can only be answered by drilling a borehole into a fault immediately after a large earthquake. How much frictional heating, if any, occurs during earthquakes? How quickly is the fault healing? What is the permeability of the fault zone before veins begin to fill with new deposits? How is the stress state evolving? Rapid boreholes can potentially resolve issues that have been haunting the field for 30 years, but the technical and organizational challenges for such projects are formidable. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together scientific and technical personnel for a focused discussion that will assess the payoffs and grapple with the challenges of such projects.

This meeting is being organized with support from the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) and the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), to discuss objectives, strategies and operational plans of research and drilling programs into fault zones rapidly following large earthquakes (within a few months to a year). The workshop will be held at the offices of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) in Tokyo, Japan, on November 17-19, 2008. Inquiries for more information can be sent to Prof. Emily Brodsky or Prof. Jim Mori.

Information for Participants

We are looking forward to your participation in the Rapid Response Drilling Workshop in Tokyo, November 17-19, 2008. This workshop is intended to be a working meeting. We have tried to construct an agenda that provides a balance of talks and opportunities for discussion. The goal is to produce a report outlining the current information on critical experiments and foreseeable challenges of rapid response drilling projects in the future.

To this end, we have organized the three days of the workshop by topics. The first day has talks on past and current fault zone drilling projects (rapid or not) and the lessons learned. The second day will be about specific scientific experiments that can be done in a rapid response hole. The morning will give us a taste of the kinds experiments. Much of the afternoon is devoted to breakout session discussions based on scientific disciplines (see assignments at the bottom of this page). If we have accidentally put you in an inappropriate group, send an email to Emily Brodsky.

At their first meeting, the breakout groups will specifically consider:

1. What measurements need to be made to what precision in order to answer the important scientific questions of the discipline?
2. How *deep* and how *fast* do those measurements need to be made to be scientifically useful?

The goal of this part of the workshop is to bring together all of our disparate thoughts and reach consensus, at least within each discipline. The groups will then take a short break for talks on technical and organizational challenges. After the dose of reality, the groups will reconvene to discuss technical and issues and sketch out an ideal drilling plan from the point of view of the particular discipline. Day three will be focussed on the future. The breakout groups will present their plans for open discussion. We will also have talks on specific sites that are likely to have major earthquakes in places that can be drilled.

We set aside times specifically for poster discussions and the posters will hang throughout the meeting. So, please bring posters on related topics that you would like to share with this group. There are no formal guidelines for the size of the posters as we will simply be hanging them on the wall.

Please take a look at the material below and feel free to ask questions. We want this meeting to be as productive as possible. If you spot something important that is missing from the agenda, please drop us a note.
Thanks and looking forward to seeing you soon,
Emily Brodsky
Jim Mori

Break-out groups contact info

Preliminary Agenda