Towards Open Science: Monitoring Crustal Deformations in North America

The study of the Earth's behavior has greatly benefited from the widespread deployment of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), enabling large-scale monitoring of crustal deformation and long-term geophysical trends.

In this work, we focus on the North American region, where complex tectonic activity, particularly along the western margin, requires methods capable of processing and analyzing large collections of GNSS time series distributed across extensive spatial domains.

Analyzing the full GNSS network provides a coherent view of deformation across multiple scales, allowing detection of long-wavelength signals, subtle intraplate strain and regionally consistent velocity fields that are difficult to capture through local or subsampled analyses.

Despite the availability of such data, existing methodologies remain computationally prohibitive for large-scale analyses across this region (or others).

To address this limitation, we introduce a highly scalable framework (implemented in open-source software) that enables inference on crustal deformation across the full North American GNSS network using standard computational resources.

The proposed method achieves substantial computational gains while maintaining inferential performance comparable to existing approaches and confirms existing tectonic trends, thereby supporting efficient large-scale monitoring and contributing to ongoing efforts toward "Open Science".