Area:Earthquake Hazard Assessment

Objectives:

• Since the Indian Plate with a very large oceanic part is bound by the plates Arabia, Somalia, Antarctica, and a diffuse

  India-Australia boundary, it becomes significant to kinematically describe the plates and their boundaries to address the following questions:

   

  How rigid is the Indian Plate?

• To continuously revalidate the already estimated Velocity Vector for the ongoing Indian Plate Motion by including the data from other GNSS stations in

  the islands around India and also by conducting Episodic GPS and Glonass Campaigns in these islands, where GNSS Stations are not there, and using the

  data in the Global Network Solution and finally understand the driving mechanisms and the response of the ocean lithosphere to these forces.

• With the estimation of Very Long Baseline vectors and their changes between India and Antarctica, signatures of crustal deformation and the strain

  accumulation in the south of Indian Peninsula would be refined.

•  The Euler Vectors for Indian Plate would be estimated by implementing new software.

   

All the above-mentioned would be answered by long-term Space-Geodetic measurements between India and other plates.

• With the newly emerging platelet known as Capricorn in the Indian Ocean, which may be the result of frequent plate boundary reorganizations

  in the past and are due to the boundary forces, which complicate the kinematic interpretations, and the influences of this microplate on the Indian

  Plate would be emphatically studied. The boundary forces may also contribute to the non-rigid behavior of the Indian plate.

• All these warrant focusing the studies on Indian Ocean Basin since very few studies have been carried out in the larger oceanic part of the Indian Plate

  using Space-Geodesy.

• To evaluate the rigidity and stability of the Indian Plate by establishing episodic network in Southern India and other high risk seismic zones.

• To conduct interseismic, co seismic, post seismic and aseismic surface deformation studies including micro-zonation in different Earthquake prone regions.

• Indian VLBI station at Hyderabad is in the offing, anytime this year and NGRI would play a pivotal role in VLBI applications.

S&T Staff:

Project Title: Augmentation of permanent GPS and Seismic Stations at Antarctica and Episodic GPS Campaigns

in the islands in the Indian Ocean (Sponsored by NCAOR/DOD/MoES)

Project No: GAP-444-28 (ECM)