April 29, 2011 - Antigua & Barbuda has been earmarked as one of the sites in the Caribbean for a tsunami/earthquake monitoring station.
 
The Global Positioning System (GPS) weather station will provide high quality data that will give better insight into hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis.
 
It will provide information about the Eastern Caribbean subduction zone – the area most likely to generate earthquakes and tsunamis – and its associated faults, one of which is located northeast of Antigua.
 
The proposed site for the station is Budkins in the Bethesda area.
 
A two-man team of Research Fellow at the UWI Seismic Research Unit at
the St Augustine Campus in Trinidad, Lloyd Lynch, and GPS Operations Manager with UNAVCO Plate Boundary Observatory, Karl Feaux, spent the past two days meeting with the authorities here, including representatives from the National Office of Disaster Services (NODS).
 
Once formal permission has been granted to utilise the site, the team will return in June to make a number of preparations and is hoping to begin shipping equipment by September.
 
Additional work will also be undertaken on another seismic station that is already located in Barbuda.
 
The weather station project is being funded by the European Union’s INTERREG and UNAVCO, a Colorado-based non-profit consortium of universities funded by the US National Science Foundation to install and maintain the systems.