Friday, December 17, 2010

Lidar shows fault offsets from El Mayor-Cucapah quake


New lidar images made public this week at the AGU meeting in San Francisco offers spectacular views of fault offset and scarps from last April's El Mayor - Cucapah earthquake in Baja California, Mexico.

Chris Crosby with the OpenTopography project (and former student of Ramon Arrowsmith at ASU) gave me a tour along the fault rupture that was dazzling. You can do it yourself using Google Earth. [right, the fault scarp shows up as a dark thin line starting just right of the logo in the upper left and running diagonally to the lower right]

One of Chris' suggestions - view the area just north of the highway in the northwest part of the data set. And use the 315 degree sun angle for viewing rather than the 45 degree. The scarps are much more prominent.

Acknowledgement: "These data cover the El Mayor-Cucapah earthquake (4 April 2010) rupture belt and nearby portions of the Laguna Salada fault, Sierras La Cucupa and El Mayor, and Colorado River Delta. They were gathered by the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping at the request of Michael Oskin (UC Davis) and Ramon Arrowsmith (Arizona State University) in collaboration with Alejandro Hinojosa and John Fletcher of CICESE. The acquisition of these data was supported by a RAPID grant from the National Science Foundation's EarthScope Program and Office of International Science and Education, with additional support from the Southern California Earthquake Center."

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