Deployment!
The crew and science party of the Tully deploy an Ocean Bottom Seismometer
Today is day 5 on the CCGS Tully, and we’re off to a great start! We’ve deployed 53 instruments, and as of the time of writing, recovered 4. Along the way we’ve seen whales, dolphins, and of course the beautiful Haida Gwaii.
Our experiment involves coordinating the deployment of these Ocean Bottom Seismometers (OBS) with the Langseth — the Tully deploys the OBSs, and the Langseth provides the signal that we analyze later. The Tully then retrieves the OBSs, and in a few months we’ll have beautiful data of a little-known fault system!
Between the Pacific living up to its name and the superhuman efficiency of the Tully’s crew, the deployment and recovery of the OBSs has been very smooth so far. Currently we’ve got almost all of our 58 available instruments out on the seafloor. To deploy the next few lines, we’ll need to pick up all of our instruments and rehabilitate them while underway — an intimidating goal, but our science party includes expert technicians from Scripps Institute of Oceanography and Woods Hole who are more than capable of making it work while training up a clueless grad student or two along the way.
Depending on how closely spaced our stations are, we have anywhere from 22 minutes to an hour to prepare an OBS for deployment. By now we’ve gotten into a rhythm, each of us working on part of the instrument to get it ready for seafloor deployment. So far we’ve been able to maintain our pace without stopping the ship, like a well-oiled (albeit well-rained-on) machine.
A successful recovery of an OBS!
Kevin Pszczola - WWU Seismology Graduate Student