Through the relentless action of plate tectonics, erosion,
gravity, heat transfer and flexural loading, mountains are built,
sustained and destroyed over time. The problem of separating the signal
of mountain building from other non-steady sources, e.g., contemporary
hydrological loading associated with municipal water extraction,
drought, mining, and earthquake cycle effects, is at the forefront of
geodetic research. Estimation of the long-term vertical motions from
tectonic forcing provides an essential background for understanding
contributions to sea level changes that are not attributable to changes
in volume of the Earth's oceans. GPS networks provide high precision,
stability and point coverage at thousands of locations with geographic
spacing near 20 km and strong connection to a global reference frame,
while Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) provides
complementary blanket coverage at resolution near 10 m. Integrating
these datasets improves vertical motion maps and our ability to separate
the various contributions to elevation change. I will discuss the use
of space geodetic measurements to study and monitor active crustal
deformation in the western United States, especially in Southern
California and the Intermountain West, where the Basin and Range
province widens the continent by ∼1 cm each year. A case study in
the southern Great Valley illustrates how measurements should be
corrected for groundwater loading before being used to estimate
long-term crustal deformation properties such as slip rates on faults.
Bill Hammond studies active deformation, earthquakes and geodynamics of the western United States using space-based geodetic techniques. He is an Associate Professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, working in the Nevada Geodetic Laboratory, which is a part of the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology in the University's College of Science. His previous employment includes 4 years at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, CA. He earned his Bachelor's degree in mathematics at U.C. Berkeley and his Ph.D. in geophysics at the University of Oregon, Eugene. He and his family enjoy the Sierra Nevada scenery while living in Truckee, CA.
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