Cristina Ramos

• Jefe del área técnica at National Polytechnic School

The Instituto Geofísico (IG-EPN) was created in 1983 by faculty of the Escuela Politécnica Nacional, a public university in Quito, Ecuador, with the objective of assessing volcanic hazard in the country. Since then, the IG-EPN has established and developed an instrumental monitoring network and from 1999 has faced the eruption of five continental-a...

The Instituto Geofísico of the Escuela Politécnica Nacional (IGEPN) is in charge of the monitoring and study of seismic and volcanic activity in the Ecuadorean territory. The networks include monitoring seismic, volcanic and geodetic networks with 105 seismic stations, 11 infrasound sensors, 67 strong motion sensors, 65 GPS of high accuracy and mor...

The monitoring of the frequency, intensity/magnitude and dynamics of explosive events at volcanoes in a state of unrest is key to surveying and forecasting their activity. Thermal and visual video observations of eruptive phenomena, and their correlation with data from deformation and seismic networks, are often limited by technical constraints inc...

The 15 January 2022 climactic eruption of Hunga volcano, Tonga, produced an explosion in the atmosphere of a size that has not been documented in the modern geophysical record. The event generated a broad range of atmospheric waves observed globally by various ground-based and spaceborne instrumentation networks. Most prominent is the surface-guide...

The Instituto Geofísico of the Escuela Politécnica Nacional (IGEPN) is in charge of the monitoring and study of seismic and volcanic activity in the Ecuadorean territory. This institution currently maintains the Servicio Nacional de Sismología y Vulcanología (The National Seismology and Volcanology Service), which includes monitoring via modern sei...

We have implemented volcanic-surveillance systems based on thermal imaging at El Reventador and Tungurahua volcanoes (Ecuador), which provide the capability to compare visible-range images with the correspondent apparent-temperature images at near real time. The installed equipment consists on a netcam that shows real time images, and a thermal cam...

Due to the scarcity of local stations, seismicity at the Galapagos Islands is under-represented. Using the ISC catalogue, we found a magnitude of homogeneity of 4.5 mb for the 1970-2010 period. The largest magnitude recorded by the global network in this period is 5.6 mb. In 1996 the Instituto Geofisico installed a seismic network composed of six s...

The subduction of the Nazca plate beneath South America has caused one of the largest megathrust earthquake sequence during the XXth century with three M>7.7 earthquakes that followed the great 1906 (Mw = 8.8) event. Better understanding the processes leading to the occurrence of large subduction earthquakes requires to monitor the ground motion ov...

Ecuador has 55 active volcanoes in the northern half of the Ecuadorian Andes. There, consequences of active volcanism include ashfalls, pyroclastic flows (fast moving fluidized material of hot gas, ash, and rock), and lahars (mudflows), which result in serious damage locally and regionally and thus are of major concern to Ecuadorians. In particular...