Brian Bonnett installs a MEVO station.

The PASSCAL Polar Program supported MEVO experiment was a seismic refraction experiment designed to image the magma chamber of the Mt. Erebus volcano in Antarctica. The Principle Investigators (PI's) and primary researchers involved with this experiment were Dr. Phillip Kyle, Dr. Richard Aster, Dr. Catherine Snelson, Dr. Daria Zandomeneghi and Hunter Knox. The project was funded through a grant awarded to the PI's by the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs. A paper that discusses this experiment has been published in EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Union entitled: “Seismic Tomography of Erebus Volcano, Antarctica” authored by Zandomeneghi et al. (See the end of the article for details.)

The Transportable Array (TA) is a gridwork of broadband seismic instruments that are being installed across the continental United States (see a map of TA stations that have been installed to date).  They are laid out in a rectangular array with approximately 75 kilometer spacing between stations stretching from Canada to Mexico and from the Pacific Ocean eastward.

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.