Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands are unique among the seismically-active regions of the United States in being mostly covered by water, which presents both opportunities and challenges for geological and geophysical studies. This deployment, which is one of a series of studies planned, recorded local and regional earthquakes for 45 days during May and June 2000. The combined data from the USGS and PRSN arrays will be used to locate earthquakes more accurately than is presently possible, because the accuracy of an earthquake location depends on the distance from the earthquake to the seismometers and on the geographical distribution of the seismometers. A better relocation of earthquakes may reveal the locations of active faults. The data from these arrays will be used to construct seismic velocity maps of the Earth's crust under the arrays.
Seismic velocity can be a good proxy for the types of rocks at depth.
We also hope to learn about the attenuation of seismic energy from the earthquakes at particular seismic stations to better understand the thermal structure beneath Puerto Rico and help predict the degree of ground shaking. This report primarily describes the data acquisition and depicts the data from the USGS OBS array. Any use of trade, product, or firm names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. government.