PRESENT-DAY KINEMATICS AND RECENT EVOLUTION OF THE CALABRIAN ARC: THE CONTRIBUTION OF LARGE GPS NETWORK ANALYSIS

Abstract

The large increase of continuous gps sites occurred in the recent years in the Central Mediterranean plate boundary zone offers the opportunity to study in detail the present-day kinematics in this actively de- forming plate boundary zone. The amount of available cgps data from scientific and commercial networks in the Italian region currently reaches more than 350 cgps stations, including more than 130 sites from the ring network (http://ring.gm.ingv.it), deployed by the Isti- tuto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia with high quality gps monuments and co-located with broad- band or very broad band seismometers. gps ambiguity resolution of such a large amount of data asks for a sin- gle and self-consistent processing method, in order to avoid the need of dividing the whole network in sever- al clusters as many of the scientific gps processing codes request and to maximize the processing time speed. The ambizap gps processing algorithm (Blewitt 2008), used to obtain daily ambiguity-fixed network so- lutions allows for a rapid and multiple reanalysis of large regional networks such the one presented in this work, that is composed by more than 580 gps stations. In this presentation we highlights some of the numer- ous scientific motivations behind this project, ranging from the definition of strain distribution and micro- plate kinematics within the plate boundary, to the geodynamic implications for the evolution of the Cala- brian Arc and Aeolian Islands.