Recording Earthquakes on the Sea Floor

Roland Piquepaille writes "The vast majority of the earthquakes are located underneath the oceans where they are not recorded because of a lack of instruments. This is why the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has developed a new kind of ocean bottom seismometers (OBSs) to record both small and large earthquakes on the sea floor. Forty of them will be deployed at the beginning of 2007 in an area of the Eastern Pacific Ocean known to have large earthquakes. One goal of this one-year mission is to better understand earthquake processes, but this technology could soon be used to better monitor other parts of the oceans. Read more for additional details and pictures about this new technology."

Comments

Only half the problem...

[gasmonso]

Detecting the earthquake is only half the problem. As with the tsunami in 2004, the earthquake was detected, but there were no solid procedures in place to take action with the data. The information went unused for the most part as researchers were unsure who to call or what to do. Quite sad.

http://religiousfreaks.com/

Scientists know

[Himring]

Good article. This technology should prove useful as we seek to understand the mysterious forces behind plate techtonics. However, scientists claim publicly to need more understanding of earthquakes. Privately, they know they are caused, in large part, by Chuck Norris roundhouse kicks....

I wrote the code

[certsoft]

for the DSP based data acquisition system housed in that orange box shown at http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/viewImage.do?id=5748&a id=2509

It's a Kinemetrics/Quanterra model Q330. There is a PC-104 based single board computer that records data to hard disk located in another sphere.