Active tectonics in the Northern Victoria Land (Antarctica) inferred from the integration of GPS data and geological setting

Abstract

Abstract A semi-permanent Global Positioning System (GPS) network of about 30 vertices: Victoria Land Network for DEFormation control (VLNDEF) has been set up since Austral summer 1998 at Terra Nova Bay (TNB) near Ross Sea in Antarctica. A permanent GPS station TNB1 based on dual frequency Ashtech P-code GPS receiver with a Choke Ring Antenna has been installed on a bedrock monument in October 1998 and has recorded continuously until recently. The GPS network has been routinely surveyed every two summers using high quality dual frequency GPS receivers; data, metadata and solutions are available to the scientific community at (http://www.geodant.unimore.it). Results of a distributed session approach applied to process GPS data of the VLNDEF network are presented in this paper, based on Gamit/Globk 10.35 GPS analysis software. An improved reference frame definition was implemented using Globk package in order to compute Antarctic intra-plate residual velocities and to invert the strain field from GPS data in this region. The strain rate obtained from the inversion of VLNDEF GPS data has been computed following the method proposed by Feigl et al. using QOCA (quasi observation combination analysis) 1.34 GPS data analysis package.