My D.Phil. Project

In 1996 I completed a NERC studentship at Oxford University, working on a D.Phil. (that's Ph.D. if you're not at Oxford) project entitled Tectonic Motions and Earthquake Deformation in Greece from GPS Measurements supervised by Barry Parsons and Philip England. I finally submitted my thesis in October 1996. I've also been involved with fieldwork and some GPS processing for a similar project in South Island, New Zealand (see Stephen Bourne for the gory details).

There were two main parts to my project:

• Processing of a 66-station GPS network spanning central Greece, observed by the Universities of Oxford, Newcastle, and Nottingham (UK) and the National Technical University of Athens (Greece) in 1989, 1991 and 1993; and later in June and October 1995 and May 1996 by Oxford and NTUA; and interpretation of the measured crustal deformations. The region of the Gulf of Korinthos is the subject of special attention and is demonstrated to have a high level of seismic risk.
• Processing of smaller, denser GPS networks surrounding the locations of the 1995 Grevena and Egion earthquakes. These are the largest earthquakes to have hit mainland Greece for some time. I have developed a new method to invert for the earthquake parameters from the observed movements of triangulation pillars, and apply this method to the Grevena earthquake. The GPS network that was set up will be used to measure post-seismic deformation in the near future.

You can read the online version of my thesis abstract, or the longer extended abstract.

Oxford Department of Earth Sciences home page

Pete's Page

Last Modified: 21 Oct 1998