EARTHQUAKE RESEARCH CONTINUES IN ANTIGUA Friday 11th October 2013
A team from the UWI Seismic Research Centre in Trinidad will be back on island shortly to complete work on an earthquake monitoring station in Bethesda.
For the past month, work has been ongoing on what officials at the Centre describes as a very sophisticated station that feeds into the Caribbean Tsunami Warning System, capable of recording large sized earthquakes - one of the prime sources of tsunamis in the region.
The multi-component station collects different kinds of data applicable to the tsunami warning system and earthquake monitoring and includes a GPS that could also be useful to surveyors.
Director of the UWI Seismic Research Centre Dr Richard Robertson has been on island to assess the progress of work done. “The signal from this station will go directly to every warning system. It will come to us, will be accessible to all and will provide additional signals to determine whether these earthquakes could produce tsunamis because not every large magnitude earthquakes could produce tsunamis. They have specific characteristics that you want and you need stations like this to provide you with those characteristics to determine if you need to send out a warning or not”, Dr Robertson said.
Dr Robertson says one of the unique things about the station is the installation of a Ray Dome that will help it withstand hurricane force winds and enable it to keep on recording data even during a hurricane.
The station is almost complete and only now requires some final calibrations which will be done by technicians within a week’s time or so.
The project costs over 100 thousand US dollars and has been funded by the European Union through a collaborative project between the UWI Seismic Research Centre and the French Islands, with support from the government of Antigua and Barbuda. As part of this project, a similar Seismic Monitoring Station has been installed in St Lucia and others will be erected in Dominica and Carriacou, one of the Grenadines islands.
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