Seismic sensors built by GaiaCode have just been installed in Tierra del Fuego at the southern-most tip of the South American continent. It is an augmentation of an existing network and strengthens the monitoring efforts of the seismicity of the area. The data are transmitted in real time to the central monitoring facility in the Argentinian port city of Ushuaia.
While seismicity in South America is mainly associated with the subducting Nazca-Plate along the whole west coast of the continent, several destructive earthquakes have occurred in the recent past along the very southern tip of the continent. The last of these temblors happened in 1949 and had magnitudes of 7.5 and 7.8 respectively. These quakes occurred along the active Magallanes-Fagnano Fault System - a continental transform fault - which strikes through the southern-most parts of Chile and Argentina, posing a substantial seismic hazard to cities like Ushuaia (Argentina) and Punta Arenas (Chile).
The Rio Grande Astronomical Station, operated by the Argentinian National University of La Plata, has been carrying out its seismology program in Tierra del Fuego since 1992. To monitor the seismicity of the region, it currently operates a network of several seismic stations. This network was recently augmented by GaiaCode's "Digital THETA" seismometers.
The Digital THETA is a mid-range broad band seismometer with an upper corner frequency of 120 seconds. It is fitted with a TAU digitizer to allow digital data output and real time transmission to the central seismic observatory site in Ushuaia.
One of the first earthquakes the Digital THETA recorded in Tierra del Fuego was a M=6.7 earthquake of an intermediate depth of a 190 km under the Argentinian Andes at an epicentral distance of almost 1900 km. Using GaiaCode's OMEGA software, the time series of the three seismometer components is shown on the right, the corresponding spectra on the left.
For more information about this project, contact Ampere, our partner and distributor for Latin America, or GaiaCode's main office in the United Kingdom.
