EAPS

Through the Ocean to the Mantle: Twenty ThousandLeagues Under the Seas with a Fleet of Floating SeismicRobots

In the last few decades,seismologists have mapped the Earth's interior (crust, mantle, and core)in ever increasing detail. Natural earthquakes, the sources of energy usedto probe the Earth's inside via seismic computerized tomography, occurmostly on tectonic plate boundaries. Seismometers, the receivers ofearthquake wave motion, are located mostly on dry land. Such fundamentallyinadequate 'source-receiver' coverage leaves large volumes inside theEarth entirely unexplored. Here be dragons! Placing seismic stations onthe ocean bottom is among the solutions practiced successfully today.But there are exciting alternatives. Enter MERMAID: a fullyautonomous marine instrument that travels deep below the ocean surface,recording global seismic activity - and marine environmental data - andreporting it by surfacing for satellite data transmission. Thispresentation will discuss a century of Earth imaging, a decade ofinstrument design and development, and a day in the life of exploring thechallenging - and wet - places that our scientific journey has taken us.