New Opportunities with the Alaska and Cascadia Near-Trench Community Geodetic Experiment
Abstract
We present plans and initial work associated with the Alaska and Cascadia Near-Trench Community Geodetic Experiment. The project is a 5-year open community experiment running through 2027 aimed to capture interseismic locking, transient, and slow-slip along large swaths of these two subduction zones. The experiment takes advantage of the nascent NSF-sponsored Seafloor Geodetic Instrument Pool (SGIP) including GNSS-Acoustic and Bottom Pressure Recorders. Twelve sites equally divided between Alaska and Cascadia were selected based on community input solicited during a planning workshop held in May 2022, that will yield valuable deformation signals in zones poorly understood with land-based tools. Initial deployment began in Cascadia in Summer 2022, with further deployments planned in 2023 for both locales. Sea-bottom sensors will be interrogated with semi-autonomous SGIP Wave Gliders. The new sites will augment data collected by ongoing GNSS-Acoustic experiments in both regions. Data will additionally be shared between existing and planned USGS and Ocean Networks Canada sites. The measurements provided by this community experiment will be critical for accurately modeling the interseismic strain accumulation and assessing tsunami potential from near-trench fault slip. Data from both environments will help constrain slip potential for massive magnitude 9+ earthquakes. Alaska has additional abilities to characterize near-trench coupling in a "tsunami earthquake" region, and recent post-seismic behavior offshore. All creating trans-oceanic tsunamis. Pressure sensors in both environments can help identify shallow slow slip not seen before.
The experiment supports deployment, data collection, processing, archiving, and dissemination using FAIR data standards, and will tie to efforts by the SZ4D initiative. To ensure data are well understood and equitably accessible for researchers, we will develop open-source software for GNSS-Acoustic data processing and operate short-courses for processing and interpreting these data. Especially early-career scientists will be enabled through short-courses focused on "Future-PI" training beginning in 2024. We will provide "Apply to Sail" opportunities for students and early-career scientists.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2022
- Bibcode:
- 2022AGUFM.T56A..06N