A Marine Educator At Sea

Monday, July 16, 2012 The weather today cooperated with the successful recovery of three of our deepest deployed Abalone seismometers. The seas were calm, with 3 to 6 foot swells. The wind was out of the north, picking up to 11 knots as evening approached. The depth of the seismometers’ deployment directly effects their recovery [...]

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Sunday, July 15, 2012 It’s been another full day. We recovered the Abalone seismometer J65 slightly after midnight (00:10) from 165 meters of water. After moving north, the weather deteriorated. Offshore the Washington side of the Juan de Fuca strait the winds rose to more than 35 knots, coming in from the Northwest. The seas [...]

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Saturday, July 14, 2012 Today we recovered three Abalone seismometers. The first one was Y1M5 (see chart for location) at 07:30 from 828 meters down. The second seismometer (J57) was much shallower. At only 56 meters deep, its structure was covered with barnacles, anemones and a couple of sea stars. The next seismometer (Y1M4) was [...]

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The fifteen instruments to be recovered were some of those that were deployed from the October voyage of the Wecoma. These are the Scripps Institute of Oceanography “Abalones”. Abalones are trawl-resistant, three component, battery powered ocean bottom seismometers, capable of being deployed in water depths of 50 to 6000 meters. We are recovering them via [...]

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Dr. Robert Dziak contributed this cruise summary: “The OBS deployment cruise was an unqualified success. Our highly efficient team of sea going professionals was able to maintain a brisk deployment schedule and completed all 25 ocean bottom seismometer deployments within 8 days. We averaged 3 deployments a day, including time for instrument surveys to derive [...]

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We deployed the 24th seismometer at 9: this morning. The atmospheric pressure is dropping and the seas are rising, making the deployments more challenging. The roll of the ship increases the difficulty of both getting the seismometer to the rail and successfully releasing it over the side. We are heading back to Newport to pick [...]

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Following the continental margin, the Wecoma cruised south at about 10 knots for most of the day. The seas picked up slightly, and there were light scattered showers. We deployed another Abalone seismometer at 4:30, and it was on the bottom by 5:30. We will be deploying the last Cascadia seismometer at 1: am.

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The seas are very calm this morning, making for an easy deployment of the Abalone seismometer. We are directly offshore from the mouth of the Columbia River, in a depth of 2678 meters.

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Wednesday afternoon, October 19th – Off the coast of Washington at the edge of the continental margin We just deployed another Cascadia seismometer. It will take 65 minutes to reach the ocean floor, 2630 meters below. It will take another hour to conduct the acoustic survey, as the Wecoma cruises in a kilometer and ½ [...]

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