Expedition gathers new data on crust beneath Mexican West Coast

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During the spring of 1996, scientists explored the North American plate boundary of southern Mexico and the Gulf of California through the Crustal Offshore Research Transect by Extensive Seismic Profiling (CORTES‐P96) experiment (Figure la). Through dense sampling of the plates, the new data provides images that unravel the style of deformation along and across the subduction zone and in the Gulf interior, the dimensions of the accretionary prism, and the geometry of the subduction zone, which is well constrained by the reflection and refraction records. The subduction process along the south coast of Mexico, in spite of the high seismic risk that it represents, is poorly constrained due to the lack of high‐resolution data. This project is aimed at resolving the crustal architecture in a zone of confronted plates.