Polar Programs

The Geophysical Earth Observatory for Ice-Covered Environments (GEOICE) project was a NSF collaborative Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program that expanded the PASSCAL Polar group’s observational capabilities and logistical efficiencies. GEOICE developed a rapidly deployable, dense footprint seismic observatory system for operation in ice-covered areas. The GEOICE project was a collaborative effort between Central Washington University (CWU), Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) and the Portable Array Seismic Studies of the Continental Lithosphere (PASSCAL) Instrument Center at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.

On June 23, 2014, PASSCAL Senior Staff Scientist/Polar Project Field Engineer Dean Childs gave a talk on "Working in Antarctica" to an absorbed audience at the Socorro Public Library.

Dean's talk ran 1 hour and 45 minutes, including a followup Q&A. He discussed several topics with the 25+ attendees, who ranged in age from 7 to 70.

Audrey Huerta, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at Central Washington University, has graciously provided some videos of recent installations and deployments in the Transantarctic Mountains. They include footage of using a chain saw to deploy solar panels in the ice, a time lapse of a polar seismic system installation, and thermochronology sampling while rappelling.

(Photograph courtesy NSF)

It's been a busy summer for IRIS/PASSCAL intern Kasey Aderhold, a PhD Candidate at the Department of Earth & Environment, Boston University. Kasey has been heavily involved in an ongoing comparison of seismic vaults to direct burial installations at two sites: the Dotson Ranch near Socorro, NM, and Poker Flat in Alaska. 

It's been an eventful media week for several of the staff of IRIS PASSCAL, who were highlighted in a lengthy piece on women in science in the New Mexico Rural Electric Cooperative Association's magazine, enchantment, which is the second largest publication in New Mexico. Then, when a small earthquake rocked Socorro, more PASSCAL staff were prominently featured in a report on the quake in the local newspaper of record, El Defensor Chieftain.

The seismic and geodetic Polar communities have worked with IRIS and UNAVCO to provide a plan for the growth, development, management and governance of Polar support services for the NSF facilities. This plan is now complete and posted on the IRIS webpage.

Here is the executive summary from the report:

IRIS/PASSCAL summer intern Alan Shi has some interesting stories to tell about his last few months with the PASSCAL Instrument Center in Socorro, NM.  The season began calmly enough, and Alan enjoyed developing a testing enclosure to verify that field equipment boxes such as the MEVO (Mt. Erebus Volcanic Observatory) boxes were distributing power properly, as well as performing ruggedness-testing of memory sticks before their use to collect data in arctic regions. But, the most impressive part of Alan's summer by far was his deployment to the rapidly-changing ice sheets of Greenland.  Here are some recollections and photographs of intern Shi's experiences on the ice.

The 8th annual Polar Technology Conference will be hosted by IRIS/PASSCAL on 3-5 April 2012 at the Lake Morey Resort in Fairlee, Vermont, USA.  Several staff members will be in attendance from both IRIS (Robert Busby, Kent Anderson, and Katrin Hafner) and IRIS/PASSCAL (Paul Carpenter, Jason Hebert, Allan Sauter).

The primary purpose of this conference is to bring together Polar Scientists and Technology Developers in a forum to exchange information on research system operational needs and technology solutions that have been successful in polar environments.  This exchange of knowledge helps to address issues of design, implementation, and deployment for systems that are to achieve their research goals in the Polar Regions.

The report of the Autonomous Polar Observing Systems Workshop (APOS) has been posted online at IRIS, and can be downloaded (2 MB PDF, 32 pages).  Several IRIS and PASSCAL staff participated in this workshop and contributed to the report.