Well, since I've complained in the past about being poorly funded I better admit that I am well funded all of a sudden. I went from no salary Jan-Feb to probably being able to take full salary for the rest of the year. Now, my complaint will be that I cannot get the work done to the level that I (and people I work with) are used to.
The newly funded projects are: piston coring into the shelf right off the UCSB campus, and an anticline in the middle of Santa Barbara Channel, to extend the high-resolution climate record back to 1.2 million years. We were successful at extending it to 500,000 years with cores taken August 2005. This new project is lead by Craig Nicholson with other P.I.s being Jim Kennett and Rick Behl and now I think Dorothy Pak (and me). We will also do a site survey for IODP coring (International Ocean Drilling Program). The latter is "big science". The largest drilling ship is Japanese and its Day Rate if $500,000. They expect it will take $500 million to drill 6 km into an active thrust fault in the subduction zone offshore Japan (Nankai Trough). We probably don't need a ship that capable because we can get the target of interest with 300 m cores.

One other is mapping stratigraphy throughout Ross Sea Antarctica. This is also paleo-climate related: when the ice sheets first formed Ross Sea was probably shallow basins separated by exposed ridges. Now, it is generally "overdeepened"....800 m to maybe 500 m with some shallower banks (and volcanic islands in the SW). The problem with this project is it is a huge area..comparable in size probably to California (have to check that). This is related to other efforts to do scientific drilling..50 m cores from a ship, and 1 km cores from the moving ice shelf.

The last is to create 3D representations of faults and folds offshore between Newport Beach and Oceanside (between Long beach and San Diego, if there are any non-Californians reading). This is funded by USGS. This external research program may have taken a hit in the budget proposed by Bush administration, but could be restored by US senate/congress?. There are large well-imaged offshore faults like the Oceanside that were active in stretching between 20 and 10 million years ago. The these were reactivated 5 or 3 million years ago (probably) as thrust, which formed the 700 m-high slope from offshore basins to the edge of the continental shelf. Rivero-Shaw-Mueller published a paper in Geology about 2000 that showed their mapping of this fault system and others. It was also shown earlier by Crouch and Suppe 1993, and Bohannon and Geist 1998.
The Newport Inglewood fault is right-lateral and near Oceanside is near the shelf break offshore. I maintain that if the offshore basins are subsiding, then the Oceanside must be active in order to keep the Shelf edge from sinking (it is not). One does not expect the Newport-Inglewood to be able to relatively uplift both side of it above a subsiding base level.

So, the Oceanside fault is not in the state hazard maps. The uplifting San Joaquin Hills have been explained by an onshore fault that dips the opposite way. I don't know enough about this, but I do think that there has been a tendancy elsewhere to interpret faults dipping the wrong way based on models. This includes offshore Palos Verdes, and a different model is the point of a manuscript that we will be submitting soon.

OK, how did this post get that long and detailed?
Chris