Last year, Dr Cox won a New Zealand Hydrological Society prize for research involving the major Canterbury earthquake on September 4, 2010.
His research paper focused on the effects on subsurface groundwater of the 7.1-magnitude Darfield earthquake, which hit at 4.35am that day.
He has noted that unusually detailed information about changes in ground water levels after the September quake - including that derived from the Environment Canterbury borehole monitoring network - is attracting international scientific interest.
For liquefaction hazards to be understood and mitigated in Christchurch and other New Zealand cities, the causes and mechanisms needed to be be clearly understood, he said.
He will attend a project planning meeting in Christchurch today with a seven-strong interdisciplinary team of scientists, including leading geophysicist Prof Michael Manga, of the University of California, Berkeley, who is flying in from the United States.
The project has been funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Science and Innovation through the Natural Hazards Research Platform, a collaborative initiative involving long-term funding.
The research focuses on "Did artesian groundwater contribute to Christchurch liquefaction and lateral spreading damage?" and will explore the role played by pressurised ground water.
Assessors of the contestably funded project said this was "an exciting proposal examining a potentially crucial missing component of liquefaction susceptibility assessment".
This funding would, hopefully, identify the significance of high ground water pressures "as a catalyst in the pervasive and widely damaging liquefaction observed".
The research would also evaluate whether "an additional factor in hazard assessment" could be required more widely in New Zealand and overseas, the assessors said.
Dr Cox said water in confined aquifers beneath the eastern suburbs of Christchurch was under high pressure.
Artesian aquifers were also found elsewhere in New Zealand, including in Nelson and Marlborough, Hawkes Bay including Napier, and Northland.
An aquifer is an underground bed or layer of permeable rock, sediment or soil that yields water.
