Packing up and going home

Jingxuan and Jake recover an OBS

At 4:15 am local time today, we emitted the final sound pulse from our seismic source, marking the end of seismic data collection for our cruise.   We’ll spend the next ~6 hours picking up our seismic gear, and then we will begin steaming towards Honolulu.    It’s been an epic, 40-day-long voyage.  We deployed and recovered 70 ocean bottom seismometers for our experiment in water depths as great as ~3.4 miles, picked up 12 OBS deployed for a separate rapid response effort to the activity at Kilauea, and acquired data on over 2000 miles of track lines.  Preliminary onboard processing has already revealed interesting and important geological structures beneath the seafloor that will tell us both about fundamental earth processes that built the Hawaiian Islands and about geohazards for this region.  Although we have been out here for a long time and have collected a really amazing dataset, I still couldn’t help but feel a little melancholy when we turned off all the equipment and began to pull it in. But all good things must come to an end, and it is time to go home!

Todd and Seis (out of picture) start pulling in streamer at dawn

Donna Shillington, LDEO

Comments

  1. UnknownNovember 8, 2018 at 6:54 AM

    Great voyage Donna, pleasure working with you. Looking forward to next season in Alaska !!

    ReplyDelete

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