One more year, the scientists of the Universidad de Granada will travel to the Antarctica to puzzle out the secrets of the ice continent. The expedition, composed of the researchers of the Andalusian Institute of Geophysics and Seismic Disaster Prevention Inmaculada Serrano Bermejo and Benito Martín Martínez, will set a course tomorrow Tuesday, 6th of December, for Deception Island, where they will analyse its volcanic evolution and supervise the level of seismic activity, in order to minimize future damage in the area.
The project, which started in 1994, is supported –according to one of the coordinators, the UGR professor Javier Almendros González – on several objectives. First of all, a higher data collection will allow to learn to recognize and classify the different types of seismicity in Deception and, on the other hand, the continuous registration of the seismic activity will be essential to determine the frequency of the seismic crisis –sometimes there have been more than a hundred earthquakes a day–.
And finally, “apart from its scientific importance, there is a more practical motivation connected with the observation of the activity degree of the volcano. We must not forget that Gabriel de Castilla´s base is on an active volcano, so that the possibility of an eruption is a risk which must assume. The presence of seismic stations in continuous registration by different points of the island guarantees the capacity to alert in case of an increase of the volcanic activity”, explains the professor.
Observation seismometer
The first stage of the campaign, which will start the next 10 of December with the boarding of the team in the ship Las Palmas from the Argentinean harbour of Ushuaia, will consist of a preliminary observation of the state of the volcanic activity of the island before the boarding through the installation of a seismometer. Afterwards, they will proceed to the setting up of a local seismic network of several kilometres and a seismic aerial, establishing from that moment a routine to guarantee the replacement of the batteries and the dump and preliminary analysis of the data.
In January of 2006, the members of the team will be relieved by the participants of the second phase. This new team will continue with maintenance tasks and data analysis. At the end of this last phase, they will proceed to dismantle and remove all the instruments deployed.
Besides the scientific importance of the data extracted during the expedition, the techniques designed for the study in Deception can be applied in other ambits. In fact, last year the research team worked in the Canary Islands analysing volcanic seismicity and they are using at present similar techniques to measure the degree of seismic activity in Granada.
Reference
Prof Javier Almendros González
Andalusian Institute of Geophysics and Seismic Disaster Prevention of the UGR
Phone number. 958 249 552 / 958 243 556. E-mail. alm@iag.ugr.es
Prof. Benito Martín Martínez
Andalusian Institute of Geophysics and Seismic Disaster Prevention of the UGR
Phone number. 958 249 555 / 958 243 556. E-mail. benito@iag.ugr.es
Professor Inmaculada Serrano Bermejo
Dpt Andalusian Institute of Geophysics and Seismic Disaster Prevention of the UGR
Phone number. 958 248 912 / 958 243 556. E-mail. inma@iag.ugr.es