Station CONZ

Questions for Ben Brooks

How did you become a scientist/engineer?

I became a scientist because I realized I could actually have a profession that combined challenging intellectual pursuit with new technology and outdoor adventure.

What is your job like?

My job is never boring (except when it's time to do paperwork!) and never the same any day. When you are working on a science problem it is like a road that keeps winding in front of you. Sometimes you stop at the side of the road to write a paper or give a lecture, but the Earth is so active that there are always new things to measure and analyze. I find it particularly enjoyable to try to devise and/or use new technology (like LiDAR - light detection and ranging) to measure new things.

What are you hoping to learn from your research?

For the research in the Andes, we are trying to learn about the fundamental processes of how plates collide and subduct beneath one another and how this results in the short-term in earthquakes and in the long-term in the growth of mountains.

2010 Maule Earthquake

I have been part of a long-running GPS project in the Andes initiated by Mike Bevis (Ohio State University) and Bob Smalley (University of Memphis) called Project CAP (Central and Southern Andes GPS Project). Most of my own work has focused on the backarc region of active deformation in Argentina and Bolivia (Figure 1). Within hours of the Maule earthquake, the CAP team, with in-country collaborators in Chile and Argentina, started responding to the event. Bevis was already in Peru and he quickly made his way to Chile to oversee rapid response there. Smalley left for Argentina. James Foster and I, in Hawaii, started gathering and processing all of the GPS data. We produced the first publicly available displacement field (Figures 2 and 3) of the event showing the very large (up to a few meters) westward motion of many of the Chilean stations. Additionally, we were amazed to see that stations on the far eastern margin of the South American continent, in Buenos Aires, for instance, also had measurable westward displacements (2-3 cm) from the earthquake. SInce those early days, I have led the operation of the GPS network in the backarc and continue to process the data showing post-seismic deformation.

In addition to the displacement maps, GPS can also be used to measure how the ground moves during the earthquake (Figures 4 and 5). This relatively new application for GPS is called GPS seismology.

The CONZ GPS site is supported by the University of Concepcion and BKG as part of their TIGO installation. Watch a YouTube video about TIGO in Spanish

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