June 20, 2024

Dear Colleagues:

The Cooperative Studies of the Earth’s Deep Interior (CSEDI) program in the Division of Earth Sciences (EAR) began in the early nineties as a community initiative originally organized by members of the Studies of the Earth's Deep Interior (SEDI) committee of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) and the Studies of the Earth's Interior (SEI) committee of the American Geophysical Union. The science plan that was developed grew out of the realization that the most important problems related to the Earth's interior needed a multi-disciplinary effort that brought collaborators together to think creatively about the state and dynamics of the Earth's interior and incorporated the most advanced computational, experimental, analytical, and observational techniques.

CSEDI-supported work pushes the envelope on the quantitative link between physical, dynamical, and chemical processes of the Earth's interior. Hundreds of students and postdocs who participated in CSEDI projects now have successful careers, collaborating across a broad range of disciplines, in academia, industry, and government.

EAR’s community of researchers, along with the rest of the geosciences, has evolved in the intervening three decades and matured to a point where multi-disciplinary efforts are now the norm. As such, research on the Earth’s deep interior has outgrown the need for a special call for proposals separate from EAR’s programs. EAR now sees numerous homes for this kind of cooperative research across the division, the directorate, and the agency.

Thus, EAR announces that starting with Fiscal Year 2025 the CSEDI program will be archived and no longer accept proposals. EAR will continue to welcome proposals that take a bold multidisciplinary approach to understanding Earth’s deep interior in the division’s other existing programs that cover these topic areas. We believe that this change in approach will broaden the portfolio of the division as a whole, as it continues to welcome proposals that push scientific frontiers at the boundaries of EAR-supported research.

Sincerely,

Alexandra Isern
Assistant Director
Directorate for Geosciences