EarthScope Strainmeter Deployments in Canada Complete

Overview

January 15, 2008

December marked the completion of seven borehole strainmeter installations in Canada. The installations were part of the overall PBO EarthScope effort, but focus on regularly occurring Episodic Tremor and Slip (ETS) events best observed in a region from southern Puget Sound to central Vancouver Island. The physical processes, crustal properties, and tectonic environment that give rise to ETDS events are not yet well understood. In the summer of 2005, three instruments were installed at the Pacific Geoscience Centre (PGC) in Sidney, British Columbia, Canada and one instrument was installed at Ucluelet on the west coast of Vancouver Island. In the Fall of 2007 three additional BSM stations were installed at Lake Cowichan (B926), Port Alberni (B927), and Bamfield (B928). The Port Alberni site will share infrastructure with the Neptune project. Borehole strainmeter installations at Port Alberni and Bamfield along with the high-rate real-time continuous GPS stations at both those locations will provide the capability to monitor the propagation of transient signals from offshore and vice versa.