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Archived News

Here is a listing of PASSCAL News items from over 6 months ago. If you want to look up something newer, you should check Recent News.

APOS Report Now Available Online

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.

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Western Idaho Shear Zone: is snow in the forecast?

FlexArray Experiment: Western Idaho Shear Zone

If this photo (below) of a 6' 1" tall individual looking up at the top of the solar panel mast doesn't cause one to wonder how much snow the mountains near Cornucopia, Oregon receive, a Snow Cat (below left) at a nearby lodge certain makes it's clear - lots of it. This temporary seismic station installed in the mountains of eastern Oregon is part of Dr. Ray Russo's Western Idaho Shear Zone Earthscope Flexible Array experiment. Spanning eastern Oregon to eastern Idaho, the seismic network covers arguably some of the most remote and rugged mountains of the contiguous United States.

AGAP Project Reveals Details of Hidden Antarctic Mountain Range

 

PASSCAL's Polar Group supported AGAP deployments in one of the most extreme polar environments on the planet.

Results are now emerging from the AGAP Project, funded by the National Science Foundation through its Office of Polar Programs. AGAP, which stands for Antarctica's Gamburtsev Province, has been probing the Gamburtsev mountain range for years. These mountains, completely covered by Antarctic ice, were not even discovered until 1958. New data now coming out are showing that these mountains have a youthful topography much like that of the Alps in Europe, and have not been weathered significantly.  Furthermore, the history of the root of the range can now be tracked back to one billion years in the past, with major rejuvenation events in the Permian and Cretaceous periods (~250 and 100 million years ago respectively). One reason the Gamburtsev range is important is that it is believed to be the initial site of Antarctic ice-sheet growth during major climatic changes some 35 million years ago.

Researchers Andy Nyblade of Penn State and Douglas Wiens and Patrick Shore of Washington University in St. Louis are part of the seismic portion of the project, called GamSeis. The IRIS/PASSCAL Instrument Center provided an array of broadband seismic stations used for the project by Wiens and Shore, along with Penn State's Nyblade, and Masaki Kanao of the National Institute of Polar Research (NIPR).

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PASSCAL's Polar Group Revs Up for Antarctic Summer

This is the time of year when the Polar group at PASSCAL is busy deploying teams to the Antarctic. Since polar conditions make for difficult site installations, PASSCAL is pleased to present the following instructive videos of Antarctic station deployments.

Courtesy of Audrey Huerta of Central Washington University, here is a time-lapse video of the difficult installation of a POLENET seismic system on a rock surface at Miller Ridge in the Transantarctic Mountains. This installation took about 4 hours in real-time. You will see shadows encroaching as the sun sets toward the end of the four-minute video.

Seismic Community Responds to Virginia Earthquake in a Big Way

When the earth shook near Richmond, Virginia on August 23, 2011 at 1:51 PM EDT (17:51:04 UTC), millions of inhabitants of the eastern seaboard were surprised by the magnitude 5.8 tremor. The seismic community has responded in force, rapidly deploying dozens of new stations to record aftershocks of this rare event. (The largest previous earthquake in Virginia's history was a magnitude 5.9 event in 1897.)

This  image, provided by the National Park Service, is one of three or four "significant" new cracks in the Washington Monument. The picture was taken from a Park Service helicopter. The Monument is being closed to the public indefinitely.

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