The New Cuban Seismograph Network

Abstract

Evidence of instrumental seismic data can be found in Cuba as early as the beginning of the twentieth century. The first Cuban seismological station was installed in 1907 by the Jesuits of Belen Observatory in Luyano, Ciudad Havana and worked until the 1920's. The station was equipped with two Bosch-Omori-type seismometers recording on smoked paper (Cotilla, 1998). Some moderate earthquakes were recorded during that period but unfortunately the seismograms from those instruments were lost. The second station, Soroa (SOR), the first of the current seismograph network (Figure 1), began operation in 1964. It was located in west Cuba to monitor the seismic activity of the Pinar Fault (Figure 2), responsible for the 1880 San Cristobal earthquake (Table 1). One year later, in 1965, station Rio Carpintero (RCC) began operation in eastern Cuba (Figure 1), the most seismically active part of the country. View this table: TABLE 1 Historic Cuban Earthquakes Macroseismic determination is represented by parentheses. Only earthquakes Ms > 6 (Santiago de Cuba) and Ms > 5 (rest of the country) are shown. Figure 1. New Cuban Seismograph Network. Activity in eastern Cuba is generated mostly by a major transform fault, the Oriente Fault Zone (OFZ) (Figure 2). To monitor the OFZ activity and improve the coverage of the area, three more stations were installed in eastern Cuba in 1979—Pinares (PIN), Las Mercedes (LMG), and Maisi (MAS)—and three years later Cascorro (CCC) was added (Figure 1). Most of the stations were equipped with SKM-3 short-period three-component electromagnetic seismometers (of Russian manufacture) recording on photographic paper. The seismograph network consisted of eighteen stations in 1989, including a local telemetered network of eight stations in the area surrounding Santiago de Cuba. The locations of these stations can be found in Cotilla (1998). The local telemetered network was equipped with one vertical-component short-period seismometer with visual recording. …