MOBB gets attached to cable

February 2009

Almost seven years ago, a robotic remotely-operated underwater vehicle (ROV) installed a Güralp CMG-1T Ocean Bottom Seismometer (OBS) 25 miles off the coast of California. Located under 1,000 meters of water on the flanks of the giant submarine Monterey Canyon, this seismometer has been continuously operating ever since. On February the 26^th, 2009, it became one of the first OBS in the world to be permanently attached to an underwater cable. It is now transmitting its recordings in real-time to the Berkeley Digital Seismic Network (BDSN), operated by the University of California’s Berkeley Seismological Laboratory (BSL).

CMG-1T internals

Güralp Systems built this OBS in 2001 for a joint project between the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and BSL. The seismometer was installed on the sea floor on the 10^th of April, 2002, by the ROV Ventana, which is part of MBARI’s research fleet. At regular intervals of several months, Ventana returned to the sensor, supplied it with new batteries and collected its data.

Such trips, however, are costly. More importantly, BSL’s seismologists had to wait for months before the data became available. They could not, therefore, use the recordings from the sea floor during their important real-time analysis of the many earthquakes in California.

During the last two years, however, MBARI has laid a 32 mile long cable from its offices in Moss Landing (California) to an underwater node located only a few miles away from the CMG-1T OBS. The goal of this cable project, dubbed “Mars” (for Monterey Accelerated Research System), is to deploy sensors of all kinds in the ocean and get their data “live” to the shore. Our sensor was the first seismometer to be connected to the node. As earthquake station MOBB, it has now become part of the extensive seismic network in Northern California, underscoring the quality and reliability of our products.

Barbara Romanowicz, director of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, says, in a University of California, Berkeley press release, "Now we can use the data from the seafloor station in real time together with those from the rest of the Berkeley Digital Seismic Network to determine the location, magnitude and mechanism of offshore earthquakes, learn about the crust at the edge of the continental plate and understand better the hazards of the San Andreas fault system that runs north and south through the state".

MOBB being installed by the ROV.
Image courtesy of MBARI

Güralp Systems Ltd. has been building seismometers for the ocean floor since the founding of the company in 1985. The first such instrument was delivered to Japan in the late 1980s and deployed by the crew of RV Joides Resolution at 714 meters water depth in a borehole (ODP site 794) in the Sea of Japan. Since then, university researchers and governmental organisations in several countries have purchased ocean-bottom seismic sensors from Güralp Systems. As an industry first in January 2008, we were awarded the contract for the design, integration, and installation of a complete, multidisciplinary scientific ocean-bottom observatory (OBO). The turnkey system will be installed in the Marmara Sea in Turkey.

For more information about the Californian offshore OBS, visit the regularly updated Seismo Blog on BSL’s website (http://seismo.berkeley.edu). This post discusses MOBB and the MARS link.



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