The Power Box is a combination of enclosure, solar charge controller, and connectors which ensure the battery is charged and the instrumentation is powered. Below are some pictures of the EPIC power box (and below that is the old standard EPIC power box) . All the power boxes have a 12-15 amp load capacity and a Low Voltage Disconnect (LVD) to prevent damage to the battery. These boxes are designed to work with any nominal 12 volt solar panel and any deep cycle gel-cell lead acid battery.

Three engineers from the Escuela Politecnica Nacional Ecuador, Instituto Geofísico, spent the first two weeks of May here at EPIC. They are planning a network of 63 permanent broadband stations, 25 emergency sites, and 70 accelerometer stations in Ecuador. These stations will be used to monitor volcanic activity and seismic events. Ecuador is home to more than 20 volcanoes, so this is an important undertaking not only for the scientific knowledge it will provide, but also for the safety of the Ecuadoran people.

It's been an eventful media week for several of the staff of EarthScope EPIC, who were highlighted in a lengthy piece on women in science in the New Mexico Rural Electric Cooperative Association's magazine, enchantment, which is the second largest publication in New Mexico. Then, when a small earthquake rocked Socorro, more EPIC staff were prominently featured in a report on the quake in the local newspaper of record, El Defensor Chieftain.

Brian Bonnett installs a MEVO station.

The EPIC Polar Program supported MEVO experiment was a seismic refraction experiment designed to image the magma chamber of the Mt. Erebus volcano in Antarctica. The Principle Investigators (PI's) and primary researchers involved with this experiment were Dr. Phillip Kyle, Dr. Richard Aster, Dr. Catherine Snelson, Dr. Daria Zandomeneghi and Hunter Knox. The project was funded through a grant awarded to the PI's by the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs. A paper that discusses this experiment has been published in EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Union entitled: “Seismic Tomography of Erebus Volcano, Antarctica” authored by Zandomeneghi et al. (See the end of the article for details.)