A network to track Caribbean hazards

摘要

Some US geophysicists are going where few of their compatriots have gone before: to Cuba, Venezuela and other countries that are notoriously anti-American. But these countries are also notoriously plagued by natural disasters such as earthquakes, and so engineers are blanketing the Caribbean with a network of sensors to detect the crustal strains and brewing storms that threaten the region. Early results from the US$6-million system, called the Continuously Operating Caribbean GPS Observational Network (COCONet) and funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), were presented in Canciin, Mexico, on 17 May at the American Geophysical Union Meeting of the Americas.