Recent News

March 7th, 2017

With the expansion of TA Alaska into even more remote regions of Alaska and Canada it was necessary to develop and construct an extremely lightweight, high performance helicopter portable air rotary drill weighing less than 1700 lbs and capable of installing a 6” steel casing 2.7m deep in any type of ground including solid rock, frost shattered overburden, cobbles and frozen soils.  Based on these parameters, a custom drill rig system was commissioned and tested by IRIS for specific use on the project.  At PASSCAL we had the opportunity to be among the first testing locations for the newly constructed third generation Purple Drill.  Ryan Bierma, and Max Enders along with Bob Busby from IRIS and Mike Lundgren  from Lundgren Systems (rig developer) operated the rig, and then Ryan and Max demonstrated a mock installation of an STS-5A seismic sensor at the test site behind PASSCAL in Socorro, NM.

The IRIS/PASSCAL Instrument Center was featured in a three-minute video aired on August 22nd, 2016 by Albuquerque, NM station KRQE-TV-13. The video, which included segments on other New Mexico Tech research facilities (EMRTC, Langmuir Lightning Lab, the Magdalena Ridge Observatory, and at Mt. Erebus in Antarctica) can be seen here.

This tutorial shows Principal Investigators how to request an account, how to log in, how to use the PI Home Page, and how to submit a new and/or modify an existing Instrument Request.

Important update to rt2ms program for processing RT130 data

This is to inform you about an important software update needed for processing of Reftek RT130 data in PASSCAL experiments. We recently discovered an issue with running rt2ms on the second card installed in the RT130.  Sometimes insufficient header values are being written by the RT130 and then rt2ms passes over these packets potentially resulting in a gap on one or more channels (typically less than 1 hour on higher sample rate data, larger gaps on 1sps data).  The PASSCAL Software Group has patched rt2ms to handle the missing packet headers and write all of the data that are on the card.  We highly recommend that you download and install the updated rt2ms program if you are processing any RT130 data.

In 2010, a group of seismologists deployed several hundred sensors across Wyoming and Montana as part of EarthScope's Bighorn Project and the Bighorn Arch Seismic Experiment (BASE). IRIS/PASSCAL supplied instruments and expertise as part of this large effort, which included scientists from CIRES at University of Colorado Boulder(1), the Department of Geology at Colorado College(2), the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Wyoming(3), and the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Texas A&M University(4). The Principal Investigators included Anne F. Sheehan(1), Megan L. Anderson(2), Eric A. Erslev(3), Kate C. Miller(4), and Christine S. Siddoway(2). William L. Yeck(1), the lead graduate student from UC Boulder, provided analysis and support included in this article. Additionally, numerous students contributed to the effort. The team's recent publication, "Structure of the Bighorn Mountain region, Wyoming, from teleseismic receiver function analysis: Implications for the kinematics of Laramide shortening," is available from AGU Publications (Full, PDF).

Sunday, December 13, 2015
San Francisco - Zelos Hotel

Presentations are now online!  All are PDFs and the PH5 posters are a .gif and a .pdf

Session 1 - SEED Data Archiving

Session 2 - Instrument Responses (given by Mary Templeton of the IRIS DMC)

Session 3 - PH5 tools and future plans

PH5 poster from AGU 2013

The GeoGirls program is getting some great publicity, thanks to the efforts of the USGS, The Mt. St. Helens Institute, and even comedienne Amy Poehler.

During February 2015, PASSCAL staff assisted Principal Investigators Sue Bilek, Rick Aster, Brandon Schmandt, and Lindsay Worthington with the installation of numerous single-channel nodes in conjunction with seven PASSCAL broadband stations (data) to image the Socorro Magma Body (SMB) beneath the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge in central New Mexico.