After a year-long absence from the U.S. Ocean Bottom Seismometer Instrument Pool (OBSIP), Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory will rejoin OBSIP with new management, a service-oriented model, a renewed testing and verification program, and improvements to their ~43 broadband sensors. Under new leadership, the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Institutional Instrument Center (IIC) will join Scripps Institute of Oceanography and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution as one of the 3 providers of OBS for the majority of NSF-sponsored, active and passive marine seismic experiments. Prior to participating in their first field experiment as a new member of OBSIP, the researchers will undertake an exhaustive testing program and establish procedures to ensure the availability of high-quality data that can be delivered to scientists rapidly after the completion of cruises. The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory IIC expects to be fully operational by 2008. The availability of these OBS will have an immediate, positive impact on the scientific community, which must now wait up to 5 years for broadband sensors to complete funded programs. Another important broader impact is the involvement of a relatively recent Ph.D. in oversight and daily facility operations for the IIC.
Seismic recordings of earthquakes provide the primary means for scientists to study the faulting processes that produce earthquakes, as well as image the interior regions of the earth to better understand the underlying causes of surface deformation such as plate tectonics and mountain building. Historically, seismologists have utilized seismic stations on land to provide earthquake recordings, but increasingly scientists have desired seismic observations from the ocean basins, which host some of the most dramatic dynamic processes in the Earth, including major subduction-zone megathrust earthquakes and associated tsunamis. To satisfy this need, NSF established the Ocean Bottom Seismometer Instrumenation Program (OBSIP) in 2000. OBSIP is a national instrument loan facility providing ocean bottom seismometers (OBS) and user services in support of investigator-initiated research. This project supported contributions of the Lamont-Doherty Ocean Bottom Seismometer Laboratory to OBSIP for the period 2006 through 2012. The LDEO lab specializes in low-power, broad-band (BB) instruments designed for year-long experiments targeting crust and upper mantle problems using natural (earthquake) sources. Activites undertaken in the course of this project include the refurbishment and subsequent operation of 30 BB OBS for NSF-funded experiments lead by individual scientists from the community; systematic improvement in the capabilities of those instruments; and operation of an additional 30 OBS developed under separate ARRA funding for NSF’s Cascadia Initiative. During the duration of this agreement, the LDEO program supported seven (7) NSF-funded OBS deployments, each lasting approximately one year duration, in regions that range from offshore Taiwan to the deepest reaches of the Pacific basin to the shallow continental shelf off of Washington and Oregon. In all, over 135 stations were deployed during this project. All recovered data were deliverd to the individual experiment PI’s, and also archived at the Data Management Center operated for the seismological community but the organization IRIS (www. Iris.edu). These data are now openly available to the scientific community. The intellectual merit of these activities is two-fold. First, the services provided directly support important research that has been proposed and funded through the peer-reviewed NSF process. Second, the delivery of all data to an open archive provides a rich source of data for individual investigators to explore new studies and experiments using this unique resource. In terms of broader impacts, the OBSIP program is providing new constraints on the nature of human hazard associated with earthquakes and tsunami. The program has expanded the community doing seismology in the oceans by democratizing the process of obtaining instruments. Finally, it has provided important training on seafloor instrumentation for a new generation of technicians, engineers, and scientists.
