Nanga Parbat Continental Dynamics Project
News about the project

In June, P. Zeitler and A. Meltzer visited Pakistan to secure official permission from the Pakistan government, and we also concluded a successful preliminary scouting trip designed to assess logistics associated with the deployment of geophysical instruments. We were accompanied by M. Riaz, who spent May through September in the field examining the structures bounding the margins of the Nanga Parbat massif.

Zeitler and Meltzer returned to Pakistan for a ten-day trip in late July/early August, in what amounted to a desperate last attempt to obtain official permission in time to allow our geophysical pilot studies to proceed. Much confusion about the steps required to obtain an NOC (a "No-Objection Certificate") was cleared up, and with the good cooperation of the U.S Embassy and Pakistani officials in several ministries and organizations in Islamabad, our project obtained its NOC just in time, in mid August.

In late August, several groups headed into the field, although the late start led several people to defer their initial field work until early in 1996. Successful magnetotelluric and seismic pilot studies were carried out, as was regional scale sampling for geochronology, structure, and cosmogenic-isotope studies and several project members spent time familiarizing themselves with Nanga Parbat geology (this included Mike Edwards crossing the Mazeno Pass). We also made arrangement for rental housing for next field season, and held meetings with our Pakistani counterparts.

Despite the late start, the seismological study was particularly successful, with a variety of local, regional, and teleseismic events being recorded by the minimum of five instruments we had operational at any one time. Of particular interest, our roving array recorded several very local events per day (S-P delays of 1-3 seconds), and the Hindu Kush region seems to be a reliable provider of at least three to four recordable events per day.

There will be a project meeting held in conjunction with the Geological Society of America meeting in New Orleans; this meeting will take place on the afternoon of Monday, 6 November (contact Peter Zeitler or Page Chamberlain for details). One outcome of this meeting will be the planning and coordination of the petrological and isotopic work to be carried out in the 1996 field season. We will also have a meeting at the early-December AGU meeting, where we will begin to discuss this year's geophysical data, and organize the 1996 field campaign.

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(Maintained by Peter Zeitler (pkz0@lehigh.edu). Last updated 19 October, 1995)