Establishing earthquake monitoring in Timor-Leste

The island of Timor is located in the center of collision between the Banda arc volcanic region in southeast Asia and the northern edge of continental Australia. This convergent margin is a highly seismogenic subduction zone setting and the complex geologic history of the island of Timor make for especially interesting research targets, but there has not been extensive geophysical research related to earthquake hazard and large-scale tectonics until recently. Our project aims to develop an accurate earthquake catalog that can be used to assess seismic hazard and characterize the crustal structure in Timor-Leste. Eight broadband seismic instruments owned by USC are temporarily deployed in Timor-Leste (Figure 1), which are recording both local and teleseismic earthquakes. These were initially deployed as part of a National Science Foundation grant to study the Banda Arc region using 30 broadband instruments (YS network) temporarily deployed for ~2.5 years (Miller et al., 2016). The eight instruments in Timor-Leste continue to record data and this experiment is funded by Geoscientists Without Borders. These data are used to determine subsurface geological structures, both valuable for understanding seismic hazard. GWB has also provided funded to purchase a permanent seismometer that will be run by the Institute of Petroleum and Geology (IPG) and a source of continuous data for decades to come.