New Zealand Quake Cruise 2

Anne on the R/V Revelle with the last OBS retrieved.

Our Ocean Bottom Seismometer (OBS) recoveries off the east coast of New Zealand have been a success, and our last OBS has now been recovered! We have had heavier seas and high winds the past week. Our final OBS count is 29 recovered out of 30 total deployed a year ago. The last one may still turn up some day – maybe it is floating to Australia or Antarctica – who knows? Our science team is in good spirits but we are also very busy preparing our cruise report. In the next few days we need to organize and archive all of the seismic, gravity, magnetics, multibeam, current profiling, and 3.5 kHz sounding data that we collected, describe our data collection process, and summarize initial impressions of the data and results. We are now mapping the seafloor of the Chatham Rise, exploring for seafloor volcanoes and pockmarked bathymetry, and we start our transit back to Wellington tomorrow.

Ernie removing the data logger. It is important to get a time stamp before the instrument warms up.

The seismic data are stored on compact flash drives, just like a digital camera uses.

An octopus that hitched a ride on our OBS