Hello World Wide Web!

I’m Magali, one of the five volunteers onboard the Oceanus, a 177 ft (54 m) research vessel owned by the National Science Foundation and operated by Oregon State University (OSU).

Figure 1: The Oceanus research vessel docked at Newport, Oregon.

On board the ship are four additional volunteers: Jeremy Schultz (UO), Brian Cook (OSU), Stephen Hicks (U. Liverpool), Alex De Moor (OSU), two chief scientists: Anne Tréhu (College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science, OSU) and Dean Livelybrooks (Department of Physics, UO), five scientists and engineers from Lamont-Doherty Observatory: Andrew Barclay, Carlos Becerril, John Clapp, Ted Koczynski, Walt Masterson, and the vessel’s crew. We embarked on a 20 day cruise from Newport, Oregon to deploy and recover ocean bottom seismometers (OBSs).

We are currently on our second day out at sea. So far we have deployed four of 29 ocean-bottom OBSs, two TRMs (FC03D, M12D) and two ARRAs (J26D, J18D) (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Map of deployment and recovery sites. The orange stars are TRMS, the red squares are ARRAs, the teal diamonds are pop-up TRMS, and the pink stars are recovery OBSs. We will be traveling from Newport, Oregon to Eureka, California and will loop back to Newport, Oregon.

TRMS, trawl-resistant mounts, are shallow water OBSs (the red instruments in figure 1) that use a metal shell to protect them from trawl and sea life while ARRAs (the smaller, yellow instruments in figure 1) are deep water OBSs that lack TRM’s metal shell. In addition to deploying OBSs, we also plan to recover 15 OBSs at a later time.

For my future blogs, instead of blogging about our daily activities, I’m going to blog about various aspects of our expedition.

Until the next entry,
Magali