There will be several presentations by PASSCAL staff at the 2014 IRIS Workshop, June 8-11, in Sunriver, Oregon.  If you can't see these posters in person in Oregon, have a look at them via the links below.

Jim Fowler passed away on February 25, 2014 after a lengthy battle with cancer and Parkinson’s disease. Jim began his career at IRIS consortium (Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology) in 1985 as Chief Engineer in Washington, DC, and later became the first manager for the PASSCAL portable instrument program. In 1999, after New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology was selected to operate the IRIS/PASSCAL Instrument Center, the nation’s sole lending library for research seismological instrumentation, Jim moved back to his home state of New Mexico. Jim stepped down as the PASSCAL Program Manager in October 2010 after 25 years in that position, but continued as Senior Advisor for Engineering and Instrumentation until he retired in February 2013 and moved back to Maryland.

Gary Pavlis and Terry Stigall of Indiana University are proud of their geophysics students. The students were helping them to deploy some new direct-burial stations with Trillium broadband sensors for the OIINK project (a.k.a. SDYNAC, "Structure and Dynamics of the North American Craton"), and Terry directed them to get them perfectly level and lined up to north accurately. The students outdid themselves, and helped to make this a superb installation.

These students are from Gary Pavlis' Applied Geophysics class. They spent a weekend installing stations for the OIINK project.

Clockwise from upper right: Tyler Merrell, Steven Downey, Crystal Wespestad, and Brenden Fenerty.

Photographs courtesy Terry Stigall.

On Friday, November 1st 2013, a group of students and teachers from Bethesda, Maryland's Lycée Rochambeau/ French International School visited the IRIS/PASSCAL facility on Socorro NM for some hands-on demonstrations of how seismic measurements are used to "see" geological strata underground.  The class, led by instructor Marc Roux, head of the Biology and Geology Department, were assisted by PASSCAL scientists Greg Chavez and Michael Johnson during the deployment of a long string of geophones and a multi-channel data acquisition system.  The students then used heavy hammers to produce active source tremors, and then were able to see the seismic responses in real time.  The class assembled in the PASSCAL conference room to hear PASSCAL scientists/data specialists Dr. Wallis Hutton and KatyLiz Anderson discuss how such measurements can be used to find the depth of subsurface structures like the Moho.  The visit was capped with a tour of the PASSCAL facility, led by scientist/software engineer Dave Thomas. (Photo: student Salomé Carcy; credit: Dr. Wallis Hutton)