Waterlines have been extracted to delimit the edge of the Hunga Tonga - Hunga Ha'apai island between April 2017 and April 2022. Waterline is defined as the instantaneous land - water boundary at the time of the imaging process. Waterlines have been generated by BGS - Earth Observation team through a thresholding-based classification based on Sentinel-2 multispectral imagery and developed on Google Earth Engine. Specifically, the thresholding has been applied to the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) has been derived as a basis to discriminate between the land and sea based on their spectral characteristics. Changes in waterlines over volcanic islands can provide key information to understand volcanic processes. For more info on the methodology, see Novellino et al. (2020) https://doi.org/10.3390/app10020536

In this urgency proposal we will deploy seismometers for 1 year to record aftershocks from sequence of 4 major earthquakes with magnitudes between 7.1-7.6. These recordings and other recordings of earthquakes from around the globe will allow us to delineate with high accuracy the plate interfaces of the new and old subducting slabs and image the slab structures at depth. The structure of the old and new subduction zones will illuminate the processes occurring at depth which are shifting the force balance in the region to reverse the sense of subduction. The proposed experiment will be enhanced by concurrent studies scheduled to be deployed in Fall of 2014, which includes a multimillion pound ocean bottom seismic deployment by colleagues in Japan. The combined array will allow us to image the Pacific plate which is stalling the subduction, allowing us to investigate what conditions are necessary for a plate to halt the descent of the slab into the mantle. Thus we will be able to understand how subduction stops and starts. Data available online at the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) Data Management Centre (DMC).