Hualapai Mountain Park is becoming part of a National Science Foundation project to study the inner earth that is called “the Hubble telescope of earth science” by geologists.

Earlier this month, a seismic sensor was approved for placement at the park. It is one of 1,600 stations that will be placed in a grid across the United States in the next 10-12 years, according to Professor Matt Fouch of Arizona State University. These sites will be used to collect data for the USArray wing of the EarthScope project.

“The goals is to better understand the formation and evolution of the North American continent,” said Fouch. “This is the first time that something of this magnitude and this scale has ever been done. Is directly funded by Congress, on the same scale as the Hubble telescope. This is the first major research initiative ever funded within the earth sciences.”

The EarthScope project is operated by a consortium of U.S. universities and funded by the National Science Foundation. ASU, Prescott College and the University of Arizona also are participants.

County Parks Director Shawn Blackburn said he was approached by Prescott College about a month ago with a request to use the site in this project. It was examined by representatives from the college and ASU shortly after. “They inspected the site, found it would meet their needs and found it would be a good site for the sensor,” Blackburn said.

The Mohave County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the placement of the sensor at the park at its Feb. 6 meeting. Fouch said it would be installed within the next week.

Hualapai Mountain Park is one of six county parks. It is composed of 2,300 acres of land southeast of Kingman. The Hualapai Mountains are as ancient as the rock formations found in the Inner Gorge of the Grand Canyon - 1.7 billion years old.

Lon Abbott, professor of geology at Prescott College, recommended the park for use as a site. The sensors across the county are going to be spaced about 40 miles apart. Abbott said this is a good site for the sensor in this area because the solid granite base in the Hualapai Mountains improves seismic readings.

There are some small quakes that cannot be felt happening in the area from time to time, Fouch said, but they are primarily concerned with collecting global data. The sensor should be able to pick up quakes from as far away as New Zealand if they are magnitude 4 or greater.

“We're really talking about global earthquakes,” said Fouch. “Earthquakes happening in South American, Pakistan...anywhere that there's activity, we'll record it.”

The station, an unmanned, 42-inch diameter, solar-powered box, will collect data on seismic activity in the earth.

“In an ideal world, USArray will maintain the data just by logging in and out of it,” said Fouch. “Data is sent electronically through a cell modem, through the Internet, and collected in a site in San Diego.”

Fouch said the National Science Foundation has been trying to get this project underway since the mid-1990s. It has only recently begun to really move forward.

The 1,600 stations will be laid out across the United States in 400-site grids at a time. Most of them, such as the one in the Hualapai Mountains, will be mobile. Data will collected at one site for 18 months, and then move to another location east.

Information already has been collected from sites in California, Oregon and Washington. The project now is moving to Idaho, Utah and Arizona. The Hualapai Mountain Park station will be the first of 60 sites placed in the state, according to Fouch.

Abbott said he hopes having the sensor in a park like this will raise interest in USArray. “To locate a station in a county park, such as Hualapai, it helps with that outreach for the public aspect to it,” he said.

When the station is up and running, anyone with an Internet connection can log on to the USArray Web site at www.earthscope.org and view the real-time data being collected. Blackburn said his personnel will use it to improve park safety.

“It will help us with public safety, and provide us with more information about what's going on in the park so we can be more aware,” he said. “Having more information can only help us more make informed decisions in planning and operations.”

More information on the EarthScope USArray project is available online at www.earthscope.org.

You may contact the reporter at reynolds@havasunews.com.