Area: Special Activities: Antarctica 

Objectives:

• Continue to be one of the SCAR stations and remain in the global scenario of GPS- Geodesy.

• Continue to contribute to IERS to realise ITRF Global Reference Frames.

• Continue to focus the studies on crustal deformation between India and Antarctica and holistically understand the seismotectonic, geodynamical processes and the plate driving mechanisms in the South of Indian Peninsula.

• With the estimation of Very Long Baseline vectors and their changes between India and Antarctica, the crustal deformation and strain accumulation in the south of Indian Peninsula would be continuously monitored.

• Dynamics and the kinematics of the newly emerging platelet named as Capricorn and their influences on the Indian Plate would be studied by including various sites in the Indian Ocean and other plates in the Global Network solution.

• The chosen free Network would be tied to ITRF 2005 Reference Frame without polluting local displacements by inappropriate constraints.

• Since the ultimate objective is to establish time evolution of baseline length between NGRI, Hyderabad which has an IGS Permanent GPS Tracking Station and Maitri, many stations in the Indian Ocean, which have longer time series of site coordinates in the IGS network, would be included in the analysis continuously.

• To monitor the space and time distribution of Earthquake occurrences and obtain hypocentral parameters, magnitudes of earthquakes, release of energy, strain accumulation and stress drop, velocity inversion for underground structure and physical properties, earthquake source mechanism, receiver function analysis, attenuation of seismic waves and anisotropy studies.

• Continue to be a part of NEIC (USGS) and in Global Seismographic Network in Antarctica.

• Continue to be a part of NIC, UK and Antarctic Seismic Web Resource (AnSWeR).

• Continue to record and analyse the Seismicity in and around Antarctica and also Global Seismicity with the state-of-the-art Broadband Digital Seismometer.

• Preliminary Detection of Epicenters (PDE) Program would be implemented to detect the expected arrival times of events at Maitri and estimate Hypocentral Parameters.

• EPI Map of the events from 1998 to 2007 would be prepared.

• A bulletin of the Seismograms recorded thus far would be prepared that could form a valuable source of catalogue of Seismicity in and around Antarctica as a significant contribution of NGRI.

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)