Mapeamento de recifes no Rio Grande do Norte: Touros e Macau/RN

Studies on the Brazilian continental shelf were developed between Touros and Macau-RN (NE Brazil) with the aim to mapping carbonate buildups, and especially, reef ecosystems. Remote sensing, submarine movies, bathymetric survey and diving were the methods used. This paper will focus on three main aspects of the Rio Grande do Norte reefs: 1) characterization of the coral fauna; 2) the classification and, 3) the distribution of the main northriograndense carbonate buildups. Reefs environments are found predominantly on the inner shelf adjacent to Touros, at depths shallower than 10 m. These reefs generally show NW-SE orientation parallel to the coastline and constitute groupings of knolls and patch reefs. A prominent carbonate buildup, where the corals are almost absents and algae incrustation is thin, occurs in average depths of 25 m, along the northern part of Rio Grande do Norte State and is classified as sandstone bank. Others sandstone banks, with smaller lengths and heights were mapped around 10 m depth. They should be related to an ancient coastline; however the corresponding litostratigraphic unit was not defined. This work is a contribution to the mapping of coral reef, in particular, and carbonate buildups, in general, on the Rio Grande do Norte coast

Parâmetros de fonte de microterremotos em Cascavel-CE

In this dissertation it was studied the rupture characteristic of earthquakes of the Town of Cascavel CE, Northeastern Brazil. Located on the border of the Potiguar Basin, the Town of Cascavel is one of the most seismically active intraplate areas in the country. In this town, on November 20th, 1980 a 5,2mb earthquake occurred. This was the largest earthquake ever reported in Northeast Brazil. Studies of this region using instruments were possible after 1989, with several campaigns being done using seismographic networks. From the beginning of the monitoring to April 2008 more than 55,000 events were recorded. With the data collected by a network with six 3-components digital seismographic stations during the campaigns done from September 29th, 1997 to March 5th, 1998, estimates of source parameters were found fitting the displacement spectra in the frequency domain for each event. From the fitting of the displacement spectra it was possible to obtain the corner frequency ( ) c f and long period amplitude ( ) W0 . Source parameters were determined following Brune (1970) and Madariaga (1976) models. Twenty-one seismic events were analyzed (0.7 £ £ 2.1) b m in order to estimate the source dimension (r ), seismic moment ( ) M0 , static stress drop (Ds ), apparent stress ( ) a s , seismic energy ( ) S E and moment magnitude ( ) W M for each of the events. It was observed that the ratio between radiated seismic energy and moment seismic (apparent stress) increases with increasing moment and hence magnitude at the observed range. As suggested by Abercrombie (1995), also in this work there is a breakdown in the scaling for earthquakes with magnitudes smaller than three ( < 3.0) W M , so that the rupture physics is different for larger events. If this assumption is valid, the earthquakes analyzed in this work are not selfsimilar. Thus, larger events tend to radiated more energy per unit area than smaller ones.