The huge earthquake that slammed the west coast of Chile on Feb. 27 moved the city of Concepcion 10 feet to the west, according to a team of scientists including University of Hawaii researchers.

Shifts in the South American land mass were measured as far east as Buenos Aires, Argentina, 800 miles from the epicenter, which moved about one inch to the west.

Researchers measured the impact of the 8.8-magnitude quake by comparing information from global positioning satellite receivers from last week with data recorded 10 days earlier, prior to the earthquake.

“;This is the first great earthquake we are studying with the modern technology of GPS along the Chilean coast,”; said UH research Benjamin Brooks, a principal scientist on an international team studying earthquakes in the central and southern Andes region.

Brooks and James Foster of the UH School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology posted the first maps detailing the displacement of land on the department's Web page, http://www.soest. hawaii.edu, yesterday. Their annotated map of South America “;shows that a third of the whole continent moved.”;

“;The information we gathered will be studied worldwide because of the open data policy and the ease of sharing data via the Internet,”; Brooks said. “;All of the data from the event will be publicly available; that's a significant part of this. (Data sharing) has not been the case for other similar events.”;

They have gotten feedback from scientists excited by the amount of information available, but at the same time “;people respect the seriousness of the event,”; which killed more than 450 people and caused widespread property damage. “;It is a great scientific event. In terms of my excitement, the event speaks for itself,”; Brooks said.

“;We have great tools to figure it out and with the Internet are able to remotely access the information. The reason we can do it now is because the earthquake happened near a continent, so we can put instruments in more places, as opposed to an island,”; such as the 2004 earthquake off Sumatra, which was also studied with GPS tracking.

Brooks and Foster are participating in this project from afar. Foster is at the Manoa campus, and Brooks is at the Boulder, Colo., headquarters of UNAVCO, a consortium of 50 geosciences research agencies with support from the National Science Foundation and National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The organization is sending equipment to the scientists arriving to do fieldwork in the area where aftershocks continue.

Ohio State University geodynamics professor Michael Bevis is leading the work in Chile, and Bob Smalley of the University of Memphis is leading field operations in Argentina. They will be installing additional GPS stations along the coastline.

“;They are down there studying the motion that occurs after the earthquakes. It tells us a lot more about the process,”; said Brooks. “;This event is important. We hope to understand more about earthquakes themselves and the process of how mountains are built.

“;The generation of earthquakes along that coast are really important to Hawaii. There is a natural connection,”; he said, referring to a 1960 tsunami generated near Chile that killed 61 people in the islands. The Feb. 27 quake resulted in increased wave action here.