GPS and Seimic Investigations
In 1995, John Beavan [1] and Steve Roecker put together a project to see if we could measure the uplift rate of the Adirondacks, and also try to understand what might be making them uplift. We remeasured some benchmarks installed in the Adirondacks more than 100 years ago by Verplank Colvin using modern GPS techniques. We also operated an array of four broad band seismic stations with the Adirondacks for a period of about one year.
In this page you will find links that will give you some information about:
Try the following on-line resourses to bring yourself up to speed on what we Earth Scientists (think they) understand about the Adirondacks:
| NYS Geologic Road map | An overview of New York/New England Geology and Tectonics |
| The Adirondacks: New Mountains From Old Rocks | An overview of Adirondack Geology in particular |
If you would like to know more about the network, try here
The GPS investigation took place in a series of stages. We began by doing some background work into the archives of Verplank Colvin, and then in the summer of 1994 did a fair amount of hiking in the Adirondacks to track down the benchmarks. In June of 1995 we conducted a large scale investigation, occupying multiple peaks over a two week period. The final field stage was the tying in of the different benchmarks from selected peaks.
The map below shows the locations of the sites we occupied as open circles on a digital topography map of the Adirondacks. Click on the map to get a full size image.
If you would like to see some pictures from the GPS work, try the following:
A fairly complete summary of the campain, including the most recent results of the analysis of the GPS data can be found in the USGS Final Report .
[1] John Beavan's Current Address: Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences, P. O. Box 30-368, Lower Hutt, New Zealand.
