It’s been a productive week of ship time. Early this morning, we completed our first batch of deployments, a total of 11 OBS and 33 OBEM stations! One of our deployments was even graced with a rainbow. We will now begin recovering 22 of the OBEM. The remaining 11 OBEM are co-located with OBS and will remain on the seafloor. Those will be recovered during a second cruise at the end of next year, giving the OBS enough time to record a bunch of earthquakes. The longer recording time on the OBEM will provide sensitivity to the deeper reaches of the upper mantle and possibly even sensitivity to the mantle transition zone.
We were also blessed with a moderate geomagnetic storm yesterday, G2 on the NOAA scale (link to NOAA space weather page), providing a signal boost that should help ensure good data quality on the OBEM. Significant space weather is not required for acquiring high-quality data, but it provides some insurance and peace of mind, since some station locations have higher oceanographic noise sources. Having a higher signal is useful in such environments.
In other news, there was some unexpected excitement yesterday. As we were steaming to our next station, we received a distress call from a nearby fishing vessel. The crew of that vessel only spoke Spanish, so we called up our resident translator extraordinaire and University of Costa Rica geology student, Luis Salas (pictured), to come to the rescue.
Considering that we were operating in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean with no other ships in the water nearby, it behooved us to respond to the call, which is not only a courtesy to our fellow sailors but also mandated by maritime law. Thanks to Luis, the R/V Langseth captain, and the assistance of an onshore doctor on call, we were able to provide life-saving medication to the captain of the fishing vessel. The brief incident lasted only a few hours, but such experiences are few and far between, providing a jolt of excitement to us onlookers.
