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Ears in the Deep

A recent, routine audit provided an opportunity for WHOI scientists to dig out some old equipment and reminisce about former successes. Here, Steve Swift, Tom Bolmer, Hartley Hoskins, and Ralph Stephen (left to right) hold a reunion around a wall-lock well geophone. Instruments like this clamp sensitive vibration sensors inside boreholes drilled deep into the seafloor. This particular geophone was deployed from the D/V Glomar Challenger in March 1977 south of Bermuda to conduct the first offshore offset vertical seismic profile (VSP) experiment to study the propagation of sound through Earth’s crust. Today, VSPs and offset VSPs are routinely conducted by the offshore petroleum exploration industry.(Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)