Basin and Range Geodetic Network
The Basin and Range Geodetic Network (BARGEN) was formed in 1996 as 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 Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology, University of Nevada, Reno joined the project in 1999, and the network was expanded south.
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.
Since the first stations were installed in 1996, BARGEN has provided and continues to represent an excellent data set for a number of fundamental studies, including: the first detailed broad-scale deformation pattern of the plate boundary zone; connections between geology, seismicity and geodesy; the variability of deformation on geological time scales; observation of crustal velocity change; and the accuracy of continuous GPS measurements.
Most of the northern and central geodetic stations have been incorporated into the Plate Boundary Observatory (PBO) Nucleus GPS network, which is part of the EarthScope project. The sites in and around Yucca Mountain form the geodetic monitoring component of the Yucca Mountain Project.
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