Deploying seismic nodes and geophones

On Jan. 6-7, with the help of a few other scientists and camp staff at WAIS Divide, we deployed 100 3-component, Z-Land Gen2, Fairfield seismic nodes in the circle and line configurations shown in the previous post. We also deployed a 48-Channel Geode cabled 1-component geophone system near shot point 1.

All of the geophones had to be leveled with a bubble level, and the 3-component nodes had to be oriented using an Antarctica weighted Brunton compass. If you use a "regular" compass in Antarctica, often it has trouble because when the magnetic needle points north, it may be trying to point "up" through the top surface of the compass as well as towards north perpendicular to the Earth's surface. Compasses have to be specially weighted to get a good reading of North along the surface like we needed to orient our seismic nodes.

Geophone connected to the 48-channel Geode system. It is in the process of being leveled and buried about 1-1.5 feet beneath the snow.

Geode cable laid out in the snow.

In order to find them easily, we tied pink string to each node on one end and to a bamboo stake on the other end. This allowed us to locate the bamboo, find the pink string, and follow it to the node when we picked up the nodes at the end of the project.

Installing a 3-component Z-Land seismic node to be buried about 1.5-2 feet beneath the snow surface. [Note: Baffin's Apex boots shown for scale are AMAZING for working in cold, snowy conditions.]

Sridhar and Nick (and Kiya and Scott, not pictured here) kindly volunteered to help us install the seismic nodes and geophones on Jan. 6-7.

The snow and sky were beautiful in different ways every day of our project. On Jan. 7, we saw amazing "sun dogs" and a full halo around the sun. This effect is due to ice crystals in the air refracting the sun's light in ways that cause a halo to appear around the sun.