Mapping Active Structures at the North American-Caribbean Plate Boundary
On January 12, 2010 a catastrophic M7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, killing over 200,000 people and devastating the capital, Port-au-Prince, and the surrounding regions. It also highlighted the complex transpressive motion on a network of structures along the Caribbean-North American plate boundary. Lake Azuei overlies this same plate boundary, ~60 km east of the 2010 earthquake epicenter. This tectonic context, as well as the shallow depth of the lake, makes it an ideal target for investigating how plate motion is partitioned between strike-slip and compressional structures. During January 2017, we collected a tightly spaced grid of multichannel seismic and CHIRP sub-bottom profiles over the entire lake to image these structures. Three short cores were also collected to provide age constraints on the stratigraphy. The data processing, analysis and interpretation phase starts now and will continue through 2019.
This project is funded by
The National Science Foundation.
