New Grant Will Support California Earthquake Network
Ten million dollars in grants from the W.M. Keck Foundation, NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) will make Southern California the best-surveyed area on the planet and provide a powerful tool for scientists seeking to understand the region's earthquake potential.
Ten million dollars in grants from the W.M. Keck Foundation, NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) will make Southern California the best-surveyed area on the planet and provide a powerful tool for scientists seeking to understand the region's earthquake potential.The grants were announced this week by the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), headquartered at the University of Southern California. The Keck Foundation contributed $5.6 million of the grant money, NASA furnished $2.4 million and NSF provided $2 million.SCEC provides oversight and coordination for the Southern California Integrated Global Positioning System Network (SCIGN), which will use the new funds to expand -- from the current 45 to 250 sites -- an array of ground-based "monuments" that are used to electronically track satellites of the Global Positioning System (GPS).GPS, a constellation of 24 navigation satellites operated by the U.S. Department of Defense, permits points on the Earth's surface to be located with high precision. The resulting monument network will enable scientists to follow, in unprecedented detail, movements of the Earth's crust in one of the world's most seismically active and highly populated areas."Thanks to the W.M. Keck Foundation, NASA and NSF, the Southern California scientific community can pioneer the use of the most promising new tool in geophysics since the invention of the seismometer," said SCEC director Thomas Henyey, who announced the grants at a special meeting of the SCIGN coordinating committee. "Eventual completion of the 250-station array will put the full potential of GPS technology to work in an earthquake-prone region particularly suited to the task," added Dr. Henyey, a professor of earth sciences at USC."GPS makes it possible to measure the position of the monuments with extraordinary accuracy," said Mike Watkins of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Although the monuments may be separated by scores of miles, a change in their relative positions of no more than a single millimeter (about 1/25th of an inch) can be detected by the GPS system."In seismically active areas such as Southern California, where plate tectonic forces are at work, substantial Earth movements of millimeters to centimeters occur continuously each year and are readily measurable by the state- of-the-art GPS technology."These movements give scientists indications of how fast strain is building up, where it's concentrated, and where earthquakes might occur in the near future," noted SCIGN chairman William Prescott of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).The array, which started with only four sites in 1990, has already detected very small motions of the Earth's crust in Southern California associated with the 1992 Landers and 1994 Northridge earthquakes."The GPS receivers operating during the Landers earthquake were able to detect, for the first time, subtle changes in the regional deformation pattern. Such changes are potentially of great importance for studying the physics of earthquakes and hazards mitigation" said Yehuda Bock, director of the Scripps Orbit and Permanent Array Center at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography."Before and after the January 1994 Northridge earthquake, the few GPS monuments then in service revealed important scientific clues about the processes taking place far underground," said Ken Hudnut of the USGS in Pasadena. "GPS technology is particularly valuable for studying hidden faults, like the one that caused the Northridge earthquake. Faults located far underground are more difficult to study by other methods."The current network was funded by earlier grants from NASA, NSF and USGS to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. According to SCEC science director David Jackson of UCLA, SCIGN will use the funds to rapidly expand the network of receiver stations."In addition to providing general coverage for the entire 25,000-square-mile area extending from the Tehachapi Mountains south to the Mexican border, and from the Pacific Ocean to the Colorado River, stations will be concentrated along a tectonically critical corridor extending through the Los Angeles basin. Each station will be monitored daily," Jackson said.SCIGN is currently operated by three primary institutions -- NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the U.S. Geological Survey, with participation by other SCEC institutions and local and state government agencies.The Keck, NASA and NSF funds also will be used to support data collection, processing and archiving at the three main SCIGN operating institutions. They in turn will make the processed data available to the entire scientific community, where it will be combined with data from other sources to create the most accurate and detailed picture ever of the earthquake hazard in Southern California.Established in 1991, SCEC is an NSF Science and Technology Center funded by separate grants from NSF and USGS. "The center was conceived with the idea that a better understanding of earthquakes in Southern California will help protect the lives and property of the more than 15 million people living here," Dr. Henyey said.Working in partnership with USGS and JPL, the center includes distinguished faculty members from six core academic institutions - the California Institute of Technology, Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, UC Santa Barbara, UCLA, UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and USC.One of the nation's largest foundations in terms of annual grants, the W.M. Keck Foundation was established in 1954 by the late William M. Keck, founder of the Superior Oil Co. The foundation's primary focus is on universities and colleges throughout the United States, with particular emphasis in the fields of medical research, engineering and earth sciences.818-354-5011