Archived News

The August 16th, 2018 edition of Socorro's El Defensor Chieftain featured a cover story describing the EarthScope/EPIC located at New Mexico Tech. Reporter John Larson's piece says "Tucked away on a hilltop in the backyard of Tech’s campus is the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology Portable Array Seismic Studies of the Continental Lithosphere Instrument Center – EarthScope/EPIC for short – the largest facility of its kind in the world. 

​

An exhibit sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council has combined the work of University of Chicago seismological scientist Doug MacAyeal of with the art of Luftwerk, to produce an artistic rendition of the seismic "sounds" produced by climate change in the Antarctic. The exhibit opened with a live demonstration of seismic data acquisition, using instruments provided by EarthScope/EPIC. The project was a collaboration with NRDC, with additional help from the University of Chicago, and was on display at Two Riverside Plaza, Chicago IL from Sept 7th – Oct 1st. 

Late-stage graduate students! Postdocs! Researchers and faculty!

EarthScope EPIC would like to invite you to register for our EPIC Users Workshop to be held on Sunday December 10th, 2017 (the day before the beginning of the AGU Fall meeting). 

This year's workshop will be a hands-on training session covering the complete process to build a PH5 archive, starting from 'raw' data and moving to a complete archive ready to be shipped to the PIC. We will provide a standard data set for the hands-on exercise so that participants can familiarize themselves with procedures for building and verifying a PH5 archive from raw data.

March 7th, 2017

With the expansion of TA Alaska into even more remote regions of Alaska and Canada it was necessary to develop and construct an extremely lightweight, high performance helicopter portable air rotary drill weighing less than 1700 lbs and capable of installing a 6” steel casing 2.7m deep in any type of ground including solid rock, frost shattered overburden, cobbles and frozen soils.  Based on these parameters, a custom drill rig system was commissioned and tested by EarthScope for specific use on the project.  At EPIC we had the opportunity to be among the first testing locations for the newly constructed third generation Purple Drill.  Ryan Bierma, and Max Enders along with Bob Busby from EarthScope and Mike Lundgren  from Lundgren Systems (rig developer) operated the rig, and then Ryan and Max demonstrated a mock installation of an STS-5A seismic sensor at the test site behind EPIC in Socorro, NM.

Leap Second's effect on EPIC RT-130 and Q330

Summary:

Q330:

Data time starting at 2017:001:00:00:00 is +1 second from truth for 1-2 minutes (seen in controlled tests) until a clock correction, followed by a gap of 2-40 seconds per channel depending on sample rate.

RT-130:

Data time starting at 2017:001:00:00:00 is +1 second from truth for 15min - 9:42hrs (seen in controlled tests) until a clock correction. Some data (~6secs in tests) around the time correction is mistimed, sometimes 11 years in the future, or missing.

The EarthScope/EPIC was featured in a three-minute video aired on August 22nd, 2016 by Albuquerque, NM station KRQE-TV-13. The video, which included segments on other New Mexico Tech research facilities (EMRTC, Langmuir Lightning Lab, the Magdalena Ridge Observatory, and at Mt. Erebus in Antarctica) can be seen here.

Important update to rt2ms program for processing RT130 data

This is to inform you about an important software update needed for processing of Reftek RT130 data in EPIC experiments. We recently discovered an issue with running rt2ms on the second card installed in the RT130.  Sometimes insufficient header values are being written by the RT130 and then rt2ms passes over these packets potentially resulting in a gap on one or more channels (typically less than 1 hour on higher sample rate data, larger gaps on 1sps data).  The EPIC Software Group has patched rt2ms to handle the missing packet headers and write all of the data that are on the card.  We highly recommend that you download and install the updated rt2ms program if you are processing any RT130 data.

In 2010, a group of seismologists deployed several hundred sensors across Wyoming and Montana as part of EarthScope's Bighorn Project and the Bighorn Arch Seismic Experiment (BASE). EarthScope/EPIC supplied instruments and expertise as part of this large effort, which included scientists from CIRES at University of Colorado Boulder(1), the Department of Geology at Colorado College(2), the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Wyoming(3), and the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Texas A&M University(4). The Principal Investigators included Anne F. Sheehan(1), Megan L. Anderson(2), Eric A. Erslev(3), Kate C. Miller(4), and Christine S. Siddoway(2). William L. Yeck(1), the lead graduate student from UC Boulder, provided analysis and support included in this article. Additionally, numerous students contributed to the effort. The team's recent publication, "Structure of the Bighorn Mountain region, Wyoming, from teleseismic receiver function analysis: Implications for the kinematics of Laramide shortening," is available from AGU Publications (Full, PDF).

Sunday, December 13, 2015
San Francisco - Zelos Hotel

Presentations are now online!  All are PDFs and the PH5 posters are a .gif and a .pdf

Session 1 - SEED Data Archiving

Session 2 - Instrument Responses (given by Mary Templeton of the EarthScope DMC)

Session 3 - PH5 tools and future plans

PH5 poster from AGU 2013

The GeoGirls program is getting some great publicity, thanks to the efforts of the USGS, The Mt. St. Helens Institute, and even comedienne Amy Poehler.