Recent News

EPIC provides open-source software, PASSOFT, for downloading seismic data from data recorders, for quality assessment, and for conversion to other data formats for analysis and archiving at the EarthScope Data Management Center. The latest version of PASSOFT is now available for general use. It is Python 3 compatible, and can be downloaded here.

The 2020 Polar Technology Conference is planned for 10–12 March 2020 in Boulder, Colorado. This activity is a cooperative effort among the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs, the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States, and the polar research community.

Magnetotelluric (MT) methods are used to produce conductivity models of the crust and upper mantle through the recording of geoelectric and geomagnetic field variations at the Earth's surface. Depending on the period of the recordings, these methods can provide results from a few hundred meters depth (short period) to 30 km or deeper (long period). Conductivity is a physical property, which is complementary to seismic velocity, and which is very sensitive to the presence of fluids. When seismic and MT data sets are measured together, the additional data can dramatically improve determinations of the structure of the crust and mantle.

Since 2019, the EPIC (formerly known as EPIC) has been developing MT resources to meet PIs needs. We currently have a wide pool of MT equipment including both long-period (LEMI) and wideband (Phoenix) systems.

Late 2018 EPIC learned of a GPS week rollover event that can affect data logger performance and timing. EPIC has acquired a GNSS signal generator that can emulate GPS satellite signals. This satellite emulator allows us to test EPIC equipment that relies on GPS timing and to determine how equipment will handle the GPS rollover event. To date, we have determined that some models of GPS engines are affected by the rollover. How the rollover errors manifest is dependent on the data logger’s model and firmware version of the GPS engine.

EPIC is pleased to announce the release of Nexus, a simple tool for creating SEED meta-data.

Nexus is a software tool with a graphical interface that allows users to quickly and easily create and modify SEED meta-data. It outputs StationXML, the recently adopted replacement format for Dataless SEED. Nexus greatly simplifies preparing data for archival at the DMC. 

As a response to the seismological community's desire to deploy a larger number of 3-component nodal seismic systems, the EarthScope EPIC standing committee has guided EarthScope management to procure more nodes for the EPIC pool. EarthScope already has 73 Magseis Fairfield ZLAND 3-component 5Hz nodes in the pool and these have been subscribed for more than 2 years out. We have now begun the procurement of another 460 Magseis Fairfield nodes for general EPIC pool use. We expect to receive these new nodes in the fall of 2018. The new nodes should be ready for general pool usage starting in February, 2019 after evaluation and acceptance is complete (bringing the general node pool to 533 units). Please feel free to include the new nodes in instrument requests for experiments with start dates after February 2019.

EarthScope/EPIC has updated our Data Policy. The new Policy, which was published on November 1, 2017,  can be perused here. It details the archiving requirements for data collected with EarthScope EPIC equipment through the EPIC (PIC)