Some Recent Results from GPS Studies for the January 2001 Bhuj Earthquake
Ami Shah
het_shah@yahoo.com and amishah@iitb.ac.in
M. N. Kulkarni, V.S. Tomar, S. Likhar
Department of Civil Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
Mumbai-76, India
Abstract
One of the most destructive phenomena of nature is severe earthquake and its terrible aftereffects. An earthquake is a sudden movement of the earth, caused by the abrupt release of strain that has accumulated over a long time. On 26
th January 2001, a devastating earthquake of 6.9 Richter scale struck Kachchh region of Gujarat state that is one of known regions of high incidence of earthquakes in recent times and in the historical past. As per the hazard map, the area falls under moderate to high seismic hazard zone, i.e. highest seismically active zone – V. Global Positioning System (GPS) has become an important tool for various applications, including complex earthquake mechanisms which lead to crustal deformations. The data used for the study of crustal deformations was carried out by GPS team from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB) immediately after the earthquake in February. Repeat observations were taken for February 2002 and 2003. For estimating post-earthquake deformations the data has been processed by scientific software Bernese version 4.2. Some recent results from the analysis of the three epochs data are discussed here, which shows that most of the stations have moved in North-East direction by significant amount, during the period of study.