IRIS/PASSCAL profiled in the Socorro Newspaper
The August 16th, 2018 edition of Socorro's El Defensor Chieftain featured a cover story describing the IRIS/PASSCAL Instrument Center located at New Mexico Tech. Reporter John Larson's piece says "Tucked away on a hilltop in the backyard of Tech’s campus is the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology Portable Array Seismic Studies of the Continental Lithosphere Instrument Center – IRIS/PASSCAL for short – the largest facility of its kind in the world.
And what kind of facility is that?
Director Bruce Beaudoin, who supervises the care and handling of seismographic instrumentation, described IRIS/PASSCAL as doing something akin to “a lending library ... for seismographs.” In other words, the seismographs are checked out, at no cost to the users. The only requirement is the data must be publicly available to other researchers. It’s the facility that provides instrumentation for the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and other funded seismological experiments around the world. From Alaska to Antarctica to the outer reaches of Inner Mongolia, instruments shipped from PASSCAL can be found measuring earth-shaking events virtually all over the world."
The article goes on to describe how PASSCAL supports students and principal investigators with their work, how seismometers are maintained between deployments, and also mentions PASSCAL's extensive equipment pool (sensors, data loggers, and remote communications). PASSCAL Director Bruce Beaudoin is quoted at length describing the challenges of working in polar environments. The Chieftain article includes a discussion of how sensors at PASSCAL can record distant quakes like the 7.1 Alaskan quake in 2016, as well as trains in the Socorro area, and trucks driving near PASSCAL. It also mentions an upcoming talk by staff scientist Dave Thomas on seismology at the Socorro Public Library on August 25th, 2018 at 10:30 am.
