Sharpening our community research on the initiation of subduction zones

Current research on how, when, and where subduction zones initiate (one of the key, long-lasting open questions in the Earth Sciences) spans a multitude of (if not all) Earth and Planetary Science disciplines, engages most geoscientists at least once during their career, occupies research vessels and supercomputers, remains a steady appearance in overarching science journals, and often is considered the holy grail of our field.

It is maybe not surprising that the study of subduction zone initiation (SZI) has therefore created a multitude of different research approaches and divided sub-disciplines applying specific methodologies and field-specific jargons and terms, of which neither is understood across sub-discipline boundaries any longer. To make it worse, a few leading SZI researchers have stopped acknowledging each other’s work, even scientifically.

Within all sub-disciplines that exploit the rock record, plate reconstructions, geophysical measurements like seismic tomography, and theoretical and numerical modelling, we have never learned more about the formation of subduction zones than in the past couple of years. As a community, however, we failed to bring the dispersed knowledge (and sources of information) to a common ground and progress: Numerous numerical models on passive margin SZI made some geoscientists believe that it is the most likely place for SZI to occur. Misleading terminology made others believe that SZI can occur "spontaneously" or that "fore-arc basalts" (FABs) are formed in fore-arcs.

With the community-based, community-driven, community-accessible Subduction-Zone Initiation (SZI) Database (www.SZIdatabase.org), we turn the helm towards a more unified, collaborative approach again. We provide the most extensive and detailed collection of current, trans-disciplinary SZI data (and from just this, a wealth of new insights), suggest a commonly-accessible SZI-related terminology, and offer a platform for community-wide, always-on discussion (see Crameri et al., 2020).

Everything is put in place to reunite, and not loose track of, all our individual efforts and advances, so we, as a community, can learn and understand more about this enigmatic, truly cross-disciplinary hallmark of our fascinating planet.

 

Crameri, F., V. Magni, M. Domeier, G.E. Shephard, K. Chotalia, G. Cooper, C. Eakin, A.G. Grima, D. Gürer, A. Király, E. Mulyukova, K. Peters, B. Robert, and M. Thielmann (2020), A transdisciplinary and community-driven database to unravel subduction zone initiation, Nature Communications, 11, 3750. doi:10.1038/s41467-020-17522-9