*** Welcome to piglix ***

Plate Boundary Observatory


The Plate Boundary Observatory (PBO) is the geodetic component of the EarthScope Facility. EarthScope is an earth science program that explores the 4-dimensional structure of the North American Continent. EarthScope (and PBO) is a 15-year project (2003-2018) funded by the National Science Foundation in conjunction with the NASA. PBO construction (an NSF MREFC) took place from October 2003 through September 2008. Phase 1 of operations and maintenance concluded in September 2013. PBO is currently in phase 2 of operations, which will end September 2018.

PBO precisely measures Earth deformation resulting from the constant motion of the Pacific and North American tectonic plates in the western United States. These Earth movements can be very small and incremental and not felt by people, or they can be very large and sudden, such as those that occur during earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The high-precision instrumentation of the PBO enables detection of motions to a sub-centimeter level. PBO measures Earth deformation through a network of instrumentation including: high-precision Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers, strainmeters, seismometers, tiltmeters, and other geodetic instruments. The GAGE Facility (Geodesy Advancing Geosciences and EarthScope), operated by UNAVCO, Inc., is responsible for instrument installation, ongoing maintenance, communications, data archiving, data processing, and data availability for the instrumentation. UNAVCO is a non-profit university-governed consortium that facilitates geoscience research and education using geodesy.

The PBO GPS network includes 1100 stations extending from the Aleutian Islands south to Baja and eastward across the continental United States. During the construction phase, 891 permanent and continuously operating GPS stations were installed, and another 209 existing stations were integrated (PBO Nucleus stations) into the network. Geodetic imaging data is transmitted, often in realtime, from a wide network of GPS stations, augmented by seismometers, strainmeters and tiltmeters, complemented by InSAR (interferometric synthetic aperture radar), LiDAR (light-activated radar), and geochronology.

The GPS stations are categorized into clusters. The transform cluster is near the San Andreas Fault in California; the subduction cluster is in the Cascadia subduction zone (northern California, Oregon, Washington, and southern British Columbia); the extension cluster is in the Basin and Range region; the volcanic cluster is in the Yellowstone caldera, the Long Valley caldera, and the Cascade volcanoes; the backbone cluster is at 100–200 km intervals across the United States to provide complete spatial coverage.


...
Wikipedia

...