We have now recovered 5 OBS’s out of 6 attempted. OBS NZ17 did not respond to our contact attempts. The ship made a search pattern circuit of one mile radius while we continued attempts to contact the OBS, but heard nothing. We think that either the OBS was trawled up by a fishing vessel and… Read More

Our first OBS recovery was a success, despite some initial problems with communication. After some trouble shooting, the OBS engineer (Martin) changed a cable and that did the trick. Once communication was established, a command was sent to the OBS for it to drop a weight, allowing it to  leave the ocean bottom and float… Read More

Our first day at sea went well with calm seas and fine weather. We are now 500 km west of Wellington, out in the open ocean with no land in sight. We have arrived at the site of the first ocean bottom seismometer (OBS), and are trying to communicate with it. The seismometer is on… Read More

In the next few weeks I will be blogging from an ocean bottom seismometer recovery cruise offshore New Zealand. We will make a counterclockwise circuit around the South Island of New Zealand, picking up 29 ocean bottom seismometers that we deployed one year ago. The 30th seismometer was trawled up by a fishing vessel in… Read More

Off the coasts of New Zealand in the summer of 2009, we dropped 30  ocean bottom seismometers (OBS). Below you can see the original locations and ocean depths. See the full post for a location map.… Read More