Image

A Harvest of Seismometers

December 9, 2012

Like a sleigh full of pumpkins, an instrument composed of five ocean bottom seismometers (OBS) in orange housings and a broadband seismometer (gray ) rests on deck after on year on the seafloor. The instrument was built at WHOI with funding from the W.M. Keck Foundation and recorded seismic activity on the equatorial East Pacific Rise, including 20,000 foreshocks the week before a magnitude 6.0 earthquake in 2008. Seismologists Jeff McGuire and John Collins led the 2009 R/V Atlantis expedition to recover the instruments. The OBS facility, which builds the seismometers, resides in WHOI’s new Laboratory for Ocean Sensors and Observing Systems.(Photo by Jeff McGuire, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)