Blogging hiatus is over

Apologies to my regular readers for the prolonged blogging hiatus. I have been somewhat absent from the whole blogging world for the past couple of months. It proved to be too difficult to blog from my last field-trip, and I have been working hard on a paper since getting back last month (the paper was submitted a few days ago, details soon).

In the meantime, a lot has been going on regarding CASE-IPY and other seismology at Concordia:

• The stations we installed during the last Antarctic field trip (CASE01, CASE02, CASE03) have now all gone to sleep for the duration of the Antarctic winter. The updated state of health plot for the stations shows that the longest running station CASE03 went into hibernation on April 18th. Bets are open as to when the first station will awaken in the spring.
• The permanent station CCD is running nicely, with both the heated and the unheated seismometers performing well. You can look up the state of health for the station, as well as journal plots for the data and snapshots of events (including the recent M7.9 Sichuan earthquake) on the Concordia Seismology website.
• We are planning both the 2008-2009 and the 2009-2010 summer campaigns at Concordia. The first campaign will be dedicated to recovering the full data from the CASE prototype stations, re-installing these prototypes for a second year of measurement, and upgrading the permanent station (CCD). We hope to stay longer than two weeks at Concordia this time, which should give us enough time to complete the essentials of the campaign and run a number of extra tests. The 2009-2010 campaign will be dedicated to installing 7 new autonomous seismic stations between Concordia and Vostok. Given the logistical constraints on the transport of all the material required for this deployment, we are building the stations this year. They will be shipped to Antarctica in the fall, will over-winter at Dumont d'Urville station, and will travel up to Concordia on the first land transport of the 2009-2010 season.
  

All in all, plenty to keep me busy and out of mischief! Now that my work load has simmered down to manageable proportions again (!), you can expect to see more of me in the blogging arena, and specifically many more Sismordia posts.


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Keep up to date with the latest developments at http://sismordia.blogspot.com