Data on Friday's second earthquake in the Kermadec Islands has been confirmed as lost due to damage to monitoring equipment on Raoul Island.
Rangitāhua / Raoul Island. Photo: Supplied / DOC
A maintenance team arrived on the island, 1000km north of New Zealand, on Wednesday after sailing on the navy vessel, HMNZS Canterbury.
After a quantitative risk assessment, GNS deemed it safe for its GeoNet technicians to go onto the island.
The team have been able to access the equipment, following structural assessment of the buildings on the island by MetService contracted engineers.
GNS remote infrastructure operations co-ordinator Kris O'Brien said fixings on a server rack had failed, causing it to tip over and power cables to become dislodged.
He said because of that, information on the second earthquake could not be accessed and was lost.
GNS said power and communications had easily been restored and all monitoring devices, including seismographs, were back online.
O'Brien said the equipment had also been made more robust.
''They then spent the remainder of the day enhancing power systems to add an additional layer of robustness to the systems supporting data communications''.
GNS Science operations and data team leader Jonathon Hanson said scientists always wanted as much data as possible to tell us about a significant event.
''While it's disappointing to have lost some data from the Raoul Island instruments, we can still learn plenty about the Kermadec events from the wider GeoNet and regional monitoring network. For example, losing Raoul Island tsunami gauge data from the 8.1 event means the DART buoys become even more crucial for tsunami source modelling''.
The team will carry out maintenance and repairs to other equipment on the island, including the volcano camera.
