Stake out: Surveying seismometer sites with RTK GPS

We used Real Time Kinematic GPS borrowed from UNAVCO to stake out and flag our seismometer sites for installation at the pre-determined positions. This required setting up a GPS base station and a GPS rover on the back of a snow machine for staking out the seismometer sites.

Solar-powered GPS base station.

GPS base station.

Roving GPS mounted on the back of a snow machine. We flagged all of the sites with orange flags and then later replaced the flags with bamboo stakes once we installed the seismometers.

We had a little bit of trouble with the GPS equipment... one of the handheld units kept losing battery, the laptop to set it up kept getting too cold to run, and the radio signal only reached a few kilometers. We needed it to reach almost 5 km. None of this was too serious, and we were able to workaround the issues, with some UNAVCO satellite phone assistance, during the ~2 days we spent surveying.

These maps show the locations and geometry for our seismic testing. You can see our Arctic Oven field base (red symbol), seismometer locations (blue symbols) along a line and in a circle pattern around one of the shot points as well as the other main shot points (yellow stars). WAIS Divide camp is ~5 km SW of our seismic survey site. The panel on the right is a zoomed in view of the test site compared to the panel on the left.