News

The ShakeAlert earthquake early warning system is much more than the alert message on your phone. Detecting earthquakes, characterizing them, and determining the appropriate warning area takes a tremendous amount of infrastructure. With the completion of a recent Cooperative Agreement with the USGS, UNAVCO has improved West Coast geodetic infrastructure so it can be fully integrated into ShakeAlert.

On August 14, a devastating magnitude 7.2 earthquake hit Nippes, Haiti, causing thousands of deaths and widespread damage to homes, churches, schools, and other infrastructure. In the midst of this humanitarian crisis, geoscientists are working to understand exactly what happened on the fault (or faults) responsible—which is critical to understanding future risk.

This is one post in a series on the Alaska Amphibious Community Seismic Experiment blog following a field campaign in response to the magnitude 8.2 Chignik earthquake. (You can find the UNAVCO event response page for this earthquake here.) We are reprinting posts contributed by UNAVCO staff here but you can follow along on the blog to read the rest. This post comes from UNAVCO Project Manager Ken Austin.