Archived News

Hello Dear Participants

We are excited with the great response we got from you all about our second workshop in San Francisco. During this workshop, we would like to focus our efforts  on providing an overview of the PASSCAL facility to young investigators, anyone with upcoming PASSCAL supported experiments or plan to submit a proposal to the National Science Foundation using PASSCAL equipment and support.

SEIS-UK Director Dr. Alex Brisbourne accompanies the staff of the PASSCAL Instrument Center  to gain experience working in polar environments while supporting the POLENET and Whillans Ice Sheet projects for a month and a half during this year's field season.

Ever wonder what it's like to support a seismic field experiment in Peru?  PASSCAL's Assistant Director, Mike Fort, recommends the Singular Subduction blog, written by Yale research assistant and English major, Laura Marris. Mike was in Peru as an advisor, trainer, and to offer general logistical support to the PULSE experiment.

Our website has been reorganized! It may look the same at first glance, but take a closer look. The tabs and navigation menu are now more closely aligned with the PASSCAL working groups. There are a couple of new topics as well. This should make it much easier to quickly access the specific information you're looking for.

IRIS/PASSCAL Instrument Center would like to invite you to register for our second annual PASSCAL Users Workshop to be held on December 12th 2010 (the day before the beginning of the AGU Fall meeting).  This year’s workshop will give an overview of the PASSCAL program, the services we provide and how to access them.  This workshop should be useful to anyone who has an upcoming PASSCAL supported experiment, or is planning to propose an experiment, but will be particularly useful to new investigators.

The morning session (8:00-12:00) will be formal presentations covering such topics as:

·      Field procedures 

"PICASSO  consists of a multidisciplinary international investigation of the Alboran Sea, Gibraltar arc, Atlas Mountains and surrounding areas in the western Mediterranean using passive and active seismology, magnetotellurics, geochemistry/petrology/structural geology, and geodynamic modeling. The project was selected as the pilot experiment for TopoEurope, an EarthScope-like initiative recently approved by the European Science Foundation. The U.S. PICASSO investigators are from Rice (Lee, Levander), the University of Oregon (Humphreys), U.C. San Diego (Seber), WHOI (Chave, Evans), and the University of Southern California (Becker, Platt)". (From Original Proposal)

The National Science Foundation, using its Rapid Response Research (RAPID) funding mechanism, is supporting a project to collect an open community dataset from a portable seismograph deployment in an aftershock study following the magnitude 8.8 earthquake that occurred off the coast of Chile on February 27, 2010. The IRIS Consortium, on behalf of its Member Institutions, will work with scientists from US universities and the University of Chile to deploy 60 broadband seismic instruments to record aftershocks for approximately six months. This community-wide coordinated approach will provide the best quality dataset that can be utilized immediately by a wide range of researchers from around the world.

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.

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.

Courtesy Jana 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).