About PASSCAL

The Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) Program for Array Seismic Studies of the Continental Lithosphere (PASSCAL) Instrument Center and EarthScope USArray Array Operations Facility (AOF) at New Mexico Tech support cutting-edge seismological research into Earth’s fundamental geological structure and processes. The facility provides instrumentation for National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and otherwise funded seismological experiments around the world. PASSCAL experiment support includes seismic instrumentation, equipment maintenance, software, data archiving, training, logistics, and field installation.

Continued expansion of IRIS activities at New Mexico Tech via the EarthScope and other initiatives has spurred a major facility expansion, the EarthScope USArray Array Operations Facility. The AOF was officially dedicated on April 6, 2005 by the New Mexico Tech administration and the IRIS Board of Directors. The combined PASSCAL Instrument Center and AOF currently support a total of 33 professional New Mexico Tech staff, as well as a contingent of student workers.

PASSCAL and USArray Flexible Array equipment is available to any research or educational institution to use for research purposes within the guidelines of established policies. These policies provide that data collected with PASSCAL and/or USArray equipment be archived at the IRIS Data Management Center and that the data are openly available to the community. Instruments can be requested online using the PASSCAL Instrument Request Forms.

What was the Data Archiving Workshop all about?

PASSCAL provides a valuable service to the scientific community by loaning seismometers, data recorders, and other equipment to professional researchers. After the hardware installation and recovery for each experiment, the raw data are harvested from every recording disk. Sometimes there are thousands of them. The raw files are gathered and converted into standard forms called SEED or ph5 formats. The final phase of the research process, which all our users consent to when they request our equipment, is the submission of their data results for archiving at the IRIS Data Management Center. It is not always a straightforward conversion, especially for new users and students. That's when the PASSCAL Data Group steps in to help.

02/01/2010

Passcalians Attend AGU Fall Meeting

The annual Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union is one of the largest and most interesting scientific conferences in the world. Some 15,000 scientists - from students to professional researchers, from small environmental analysis groups to huge government entities like NASA and NOAA - and a small troop from IRIS - gathered at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco for a week in mid-December 2009 to share their studies and recent results with each other, and with anyone curious enough to listen in.

02/01/2010

August/September 2009 New Mexico Earthquake Swarm in the Central Rio Grande Rift

Courtesy Jana Stakova-Pursley, NMT

Seismicity in central New Mexico, southwestern United States, is dominated by earthquakes occurring above the mid-crustal Socorro Magma Body (SMB). The SMB is a sill-like feature ≥ 3400 km2 in area, with a top surface at 19-km depth spanning the inner Rio Grande rift half-graben system. Inflation of the magma body at rates of several mm/year, perhaps coupled with shallow transport of aqueous fluids, is the prevailing model for the region’s long-standing and anomalous seismicity. Clustered swarms of small magnitude earthquakes have been noted since the 1860s throughout this region, and have been recorded instrumentally since the early 1960’s (Figure 1, blue squares, Sanford et al., 20021).

09/25/2009

Array of Arrays: Elusive ETS in the Cascadia Subduction Zone

ETS, or 'episodic tremor and slip', is a recently discovered phenomenon in seismic research. Similar to earthquakes but much smaller in magnitude, ETS events are associated with the subduction zone of some convergent plate boundaries. One such region, the Cascadia subduction zone under the Puget Sound, is the focus of an experiment by Ken Creager's group at the University of Washington (UW), called Array of Arrays.

10/01/2009

Sierra Negra Volcano, Galápagos Islands Deployment

In July and August of 2009, seven scientists deployed several seismic sensors for a two-year multidisciplinary study of one of the world's most active volcanoes, the Sierra Negra Volcano of the Galápagos Islands. The project's official name is “Collaborative Research: An integrated seismic-geodetic study of active magmatic processes at Sierra Negra volcano, Galápagos Islands.”

09/08/2009

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