A Silica Long Base Tiltmeter with high Stability and Resolution

Two 100 m long silica water tube tiltmeters (based on the communicating vessels' principle) were installed in the French Vosges Massif one along the 37°E direction and the other one along the 127°E direction. This experiment was part of a hydrology research project which started at the end of the year 2004 to study the effect of the hydrological load of an aquifer in the Rhin Valley and the associated crustal flexure. In order to gather relevant data, we need to be able to measure the strain or tilt with high resolution and stability for periods ranging from few minutes to few years. The site is a mine located at 35 km eastward from the large Rhin aquifer. Our instruments have shown a remarkably good stability and resolution (6.5x10-9rad/month) and were even able to detect the toroidal and spheroidal free oscillations of the Earth excited by the two last major earthquakes of Sumatra. Long base Tiltmeters will be a part of future multi-parameters survey projects if they can be installed in a larger variety of sites. After this first hydrological experiment we set up a new pair of long base tiltmeters to observe the influence of a underground aquifer exploited by the town of Ploemeur (Morbihan). Water pumping has been stopped during 41 hours to prompt a variation of volume between 2000 and 4000 m3 inducing a variation of pressure in the cavity. In this multi-parameters survey which included GPS, absolute and relative gravimetric and tiltmetric measurements only the long base tiltmeters have a sufficient resolution to detect the vertical rock deformation of 0.1 to 1 mm over a base of 1000m.