UB Geologist To Use Data Gathered By Shuttle To Develop New Way To Map Shorelines, Detect Quake, Volcanic Activity

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A project led by a University at Buffalo geologist involving the topographic mapper being flown by the space shuttle Endeavour could help to develop a new and far more accurate way to map features of shorelines and aid scientists in determining past and future volcanic and seismic activity in an area.

The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) is gathering data to make the first single, topographic map of the entire world, an advance that will provide scientists in numerous fields with the most accurate topographic information ever made available. The SRTM data will be used to generate digital elevation maps of Earth's surface.

Once the shuttle returns to Earth, Marcus Bursik, Ph.D, associate professor of geology, in UB's College of Art and Sciences, will analyze some of the data to examine the unusual topography surrounding Mono Lake, east of Yosemite National Park in California, one of the most beautiful.

In particular, Bursik will look at how volcanic activity and the faulting of the nearby Sierra Nevada mountain range have warped the lake's shoreline. He will use that information to paint a picture of the warping of the shoreline caused by volcanic eruptions and earthquakes over many tens of thousands of years.

According to Bursik, shorelines are good indicators of volcanic and earthquake activity because they all started out level.

"We're using Mono Lake as a test to compare the SRTM results with those from the Global Positioning Satellite," he said. "If it works, it would be especially useful for mapping the topography of remote places."

Until now, scientists only have been able to gather accurate information on shorelines by surveying -- which is extremely time-consuming -- or through data collected by the Global Positioning System. The drawback of both methods, Bursik, said, is that they require personnel to be on-site to collect the data. So data doesn't exist for remote sites, such as the Aleutian Islands, the volcanically active islands off the tip of Alaska.

"The shorelines, or 'bathtub rings,' can tell us how fast faults are moving and how much the earth moves when a volcano erupts," said Bursik, "information that we can use to better understand volcanic and earthquake activity in the surrounding region.

"If we can prove that the data gathered by the SRTM allows us to analyze the lake shoreline of Mono Lake, then we would have, in one fell swoop, all the data we would need to do these kinds of topographic analyses for almost every place in the world, up to the resolution of the SRTM data."

The collection of such accurate data is being made possible through the use of a technique called single-pass interferometry, in which two images are acquired at the same time from different sets of radar antennas. The combination of the two images produces the single, three-dimensional image.