An Overview
Academic Affiliation: University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez
Biography
Angel grew up in Luquillo, a beach town on the eastern side of Puerto Rico. He is currently studying geology at University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez Campus on the west coast. He has always been intrigued by events such as hurricanes, thunderstorms, earthquakes, and tsunamis. When exploring the course selections at UPR-Mayaguez, he discovered the opportunity to major in geology. He says that taking the first introductory geology class changed his world. When Angel is not at school with friends, he spends a lot of time with his family.
Abstract
GPS site velocities in the San Bernardino Mountains
The southern part of the San Andreas Fault (SAF) has been locked for almost two centuries now, but because of the elastic behavior of the Earth’s crust, the surroundings are moving, and thus accumulating strain along the fault. To know how much strain has been accumulated on the San Bernardino Strand (SBS) of the SAF, a Global Positioning System (GPS) campaign was conducted in mid July 2011 collecting data from 25 different benchmarks to measure sites positions in and around the San Bernardino Mountains. Combining these positions with positions measured in previous years, we created time series to determine each site’s rate and direction of motion. The east and north velocities were combined to obtain a horizontal velocity for each site. All of the sites are moving toward northwest, at rates ranging from 11.6 to 35.1 mm/yr. As expected, stations farther to the west are moving faster (relative to the North American plate) than those to the east. In the companion project (Grijalva), these site velocities are use to describe the crustal deformation within a transect area across the SAF and other parallel faults to find the combinations of fault slip rates that fit the site velocities well.