Operational Details

BARGEN

The Basin and Range Geodetic Network (BARGEN) is a collaborative project between the California Institute of Technology Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Radio and Geoastronomy Division.

The objective of BARGEN is to study deformation in the ~1000 km-wide Basin and Range province of the western U.S. a major constituent of the Pacific-North American plate boundary zone. The network is currently comprised of 69 Global Positioning System (GPS) stations, covering: two east-west transects across the northern Basin and Range, a coarse array spanning the Southern Basin and Range, and a dense cluster in the Yucca Mountain, Nevada region.

Yucca Mountain

The geodetic monitoring of the Yucca Mountain Nevada Region is a collaborative project between the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology, University of Nevada, the California Institute of Technology Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Radio and Geoastronomy Division.

The objective of the project is to perform geodetic monitor of the Yucca Mountain region with continuous Global Positioning System (GPS) measurements, thereby providing the public and the Yucca Mountain Project with independent scientific data concerning the use of Yucca Mountain as a potential high-level radioactive waste repository. The original network, comprising 32 GPS stations has recently been expanded to 46.