¡Installs Complete!

As of two days ago, all 22 sensors to be deployed on this push have been successfully installed! They’re all, seemingly, set to run for the next six months until we return for a service run to see if our seismic prayers have been answered. The remaining two stations were deployed in western Timor in the towns of Lelogama and Oni in that order. The drive to Lelogama was harrowing. To say we got there via “road” gives the wrong impression so I’ll use the term trackway instead. It took us about 3.5 hours to cover about 35 kilometers on the map. In other words we were moving at about 6 miles an hour. The difficult path notwithstanding, Alicia Keys kept me company in the truck and we made it there with all our equipment intact. The actual install itself was just ducky. We put the sensor behind the local regent’s office and took pictures with the locals. 15 or so teenage boys lined up and took individual shots with me so I think my digital footprint on Indonesian Facebook is now larger than I’d ever imagined (or hoped) it would be! A little PR goes a long way though: The more popular we are with the villagers the safer our equipment - definitely a good investment. 

The 22nd station!

The next site (above) was unremarkable aside from its relative ease and the fact that it marked the end of our current mission. Having sewn all our beloveds into the Earth, it was time to say “sampai jumpa” (‘til next time) or “sampai enam bulan” (see you in 6 months) to all our favorite buddies. Before we left, our old pal and former neighbor Adi and our new friend/BMKG staffer who did a great job assisting with the final two stations took us to one of Kupang’s most popular restaurants to sample the city’s signature pork dish. It’s kind of like barbeque and is dangerously tasty. The photo speaks for itself, Nova, Adi, Adit and I were all “kenyang sekali” (stuffed)!

Hubba hubba! The divinity in the foreground is called sate and behind it is a stunning mountain of se'i, one of the signature dishes of Kupang. There were no leftovers.

So, here’s our final array as it stands now:

Pretty amazing, huh? Two and a half months, 84,000 liters of sweat and dozens of delightful friends later, we are on the cusp of returning to California to see the people and catch up with the beers we’ve missed most. I’m very excited for Thanksgiving, but I fear there might be a paucity of white rice and an overabundance of eating utensils for my new Indonesian palate and dining customs.

Here's a more zoomed-out version to help consider the broader tectonic environment:

Timor Leste data collection complete

It was a rapid-paced week traveling throughout Timor Leste.  All eight stations have been visited, data has been collected, and our collaboration with IPG has moved forward.  Many thanks to the newly appointed earthquake specialist Mr. Luis Teofilo.  Our future plans for collaboration involve building IPG's earthquake analysis capabilities directly through Luis.  After returning from the more distant locations, we had two stations remaining - a 30 minute drive south from Dili and a 1.5 hour boat ride north of Dili.  To the south, Dare is a village that is perched 400 meters above sea level, providing a different climate and vegetation profile.  Being the station closest to Dili, we used this as an opportunity to bring the national television network TVTL along to advertise our project.  IPG president Helio Guterres discussion our collaboration and they shot more footage of me working with the IPG staff to service the station as well as describe the nature of the data we are recording.

The station in Dare has provided the highest quality
signal so far.  It also has the best setting as it overlooks
Dili as well as Atauro Island in the distance. 

Taken after the taping of the local television channel's segment.  From
left to right, the site owner, IPG Vice President Jorge Martins, myself, IPG hazard division
director Eugenio Soares, IPG President Helio Guterres.  Inset shows the banner
that advertises our collaborative project.

The next day, Luis and I headed across the Wetar Strait to Atauro Island.  The ride there provided some excellent lighting over calm waters.  The mainland faded in the distance as Atauro came into view.  The occasional flying fish could be seen - they typically hop out of the boat wake like crickets leap from grass when walking through a field.

Surreal lighting on the trip from Dili to Atauro Island.  I was fortunate to catch a
flying fish in the act (lower right corner) - they pop out of the water, vigorously
flap fins, then glide for up to 50 meters.  

We have finished most of our mission for the field season: 22 stations have been installed in NTT province of Indonesia, and 8 stations have been serviced with data collected from Timor Leste.  A final few days in Jakarta will allow us to tie up a few loose ends.  I leave you with a taste of some juicy data: the earthquake shown occurred while we were installing in Flores Island.  We received a call from one of the site hosts on Sumba Island saying that they felt this gempa bumi.  Our seismometers in Timor Leste certainly did as well...

A view of the 30 October, 2014 deep (545 km) earthquake that occurred ~140 km
north of Bali.  All eight stations from Timor Leste shown in this 1 hour segment of data.
A filter has been applied to these vertical channel data (2 Hz - 100s). 

Finishing off Flores

With Dr. Larry in Timor Timur, the next step of my training process began. I was to lead the installation of the final 3 stations: One in western Flores and two in Western Timor (Timor Barat). All along I’ve been going through the process of transforming from a helper caterpillar to a true field monarch butterfly and these final installs are kind of like the de facto final exam in Dr. Larry’s school of hard knocks. I’ve been groomed for success and that is precisely what I intend to reap but I'm coming to learn that the captain’s seat can certainly be a stressful one at times. Nevertheless, I’m excited and I know I’m prepared. There is no classroom in which I could have learned what I have here and no textbook capable of forming me the way this experience has. True field-seismology savvy is hewn from the terrain it aims to probe. I know Leland (and Meghan) will laugh when reading this, but being in the position I’m in now means a lot to me. Now to the action part!

A snapshot of western Flores with a pin dropped on the station we installed. Note the giant basin to the south-southeast of the pin - something we purposefully avoided.

Nova and I flew to Labuan Bajo to install a final station in western Flores to compliment the station we built in Pagal and the Indonesian station in Labuan Bajo itself, which is conveniently located about a stone’s throw from the local airport... We brought a BMKG (department of meteorology, climatology and geophysics) staff member with us to give him a taste of our trade and he wound up being one of the most helpful and promising scientists and friends we’ve met this whole trip. His name is Ricky Man and I’ll brag about him shortly.

The city of Labuan Bajo is pretty touristy (not a surprise given that it’s gorgeous, near Komodo Island and is a popular dive spot) which means it's expensive and even more people offer at the top of their lungs to carry your bags for money, but we found a silver lining in a what may be NTT’s only frozen yoghurt shop.

We set off to the southeast towards some rugged topography that is presumably the result of both volcanic and back thrusting activity in the region. We met with the regional leader (the camat [pronounced “cha-mat”]) and he was so excited about our project that he gifted me a sweet hat and unofficially inducted me into his sweet hat club! I think I’m the tallest member of this chapter. 

Camat 2 to my left, his wife beside him and Ricky 2 to my right. The camat's name is France Selatan, which means South France. Indonesian naming conventions are totally different from ours and this man absolutely deserves his power name.

With the help of local directions and some a priori research on Google Earth, we found the village of Rengkas, which was just about where we had hoped to put a station based on our array. With the village leader, a few good local men and 5,000 cigarettes, we began rooting around some mountainous farmland. Pretty soon the sky opened up and an impressive downpour soaked us all to the bone. Visibility went from being able to see clear across a massive valley to that same valley looking like an impressionist painting of an off-white wall. With how hot this whole field excursion has been, I thought the rain was actually really refreshing. The villagers, however, seemed less enthused and huddled under some trees, undoubtedly making fun of me and whooping with laugher every time I almost slipped, while I romped around and eventually found the site that was to host our beloved sensor. We marked the site, cleared it with the landowner, lined up a labor team for the next day and set off for Labuan Bajo for the night.

On the way back west, something happened that was so frustrating and unstoppable it was almost hilarious and definitely put lesser traffic problems in perspective. The roads are mediocre, at best, when dry. When wet, they tend to be a little softer, one might say. About 15 km from the city, we arrived at a very long line of stopped cars. We hopped out to see what the holdup was and saw this: a massive, probably overloaded, truck had turned a tight corner and half sunk into the ground adjacent the asphalt. He had done so in such a way that his truck was blocking the road from both directions. On either side of this “beached whale” was a one-lane road (two lanes when dry but the rain had really done a number on it and the road had been reduced to a thin strip of asphalt dissecting a swamp). Trucks were lined up downhill for a solid kilometer and even if you could get around the sunken giant you were pretty much stuck there because you couldn’t get around the aggravated truckers behind him. After a period of time that wound up being mercifully much shorter than my increasingly pessimistic estimates, the trucks downhill found a way to pull over so cars could pass on the shoulder and we were in a sturdy pickup (the Hilux!) so we didn’t have any issues skirting around them. We got home and we passed out.

The next day we successfully put in the station and finished about 5 minutes before an identical thunderstorm rolled in and shooed us away from the completed site. We were all pleased with the final result and I’m confident Leland would have been too. Ricky (aka Slick Rick) was tremendously helpful! He jumped at the chance to carry heavy things up steep paths, chipped in good old-fashioned physical labor, made sure to carefully observe all of my work with the technical equipment while asking genuinely good questions, and, was instrumental in winning over the locals. Ricky is from Flores and is fluent in the local dialect, which obviously helped establish some extra trust with the villagers. While I was leveling the sensor, Ricky took the time to draw time series in the dirt and explained how the sensor records waves that travel from afar, that it has three components and why it’s important for it to be precisely oriented. He’s the type of guy we want to continue to work with on this project and on future projects too. His English is good enough to read scientific papers so I’ll be sending him a number of them to discuss when I return. Here he is with the first station he’s ever helped install – it won’t be his last:

Get 'em, Rick! Also, note the scenic valley in the background. Definitely a perk.

Tomorrow: Lelogama in western Timor. 

The balance between good and evil, part 2

There is something mysterious about the mountain city in central Timor Leste, Same (pronounced 'saw-may').  In a previous post, I detailed the duel nature of installing a station in this city – the treacherous passage to get to Same balanced by the beauty of city’s setting.  This duality is still very much present, but this trip offered another round of contrasting factors.  To travel to Same, we set out from Dili to the east. 

We visited stations in Baucau, Los Palos, then Viqueque.  The collection of data in Baucau and Los Palos was fairly routine: change out data cards, improve the station conditions, make a few updates to the recording parameters.  The visit to Viqueque was not so good.  Back in August, I learned from IPG that there was some flooding that put the station in jeopardy.  Their notes suggested that it may still be ok, but I was very nervous and anxious to visit the station.  At first glance, the power system was in good order despite a little water being present inside the equipment box.  However, a critical issue with the seismometer required that the station be decommissioned and taken back to Dili.  Major bummer.  There was no point in leaving the other equipment behind, so we packed everything up and headed to Same.  The road did not disappoint, proving to be as treacherous as ever.  If the sensor was not broken before we pulled it, it most certainly is now.  We arrived after dark in Same and were lucky to take the last two rooms available in the hotel. 

The station in Viqueque, before and after the visit.  We plan
to get it back in order on the next visit.

The next morning, we planned for a quick data collection and station service to give enough time for the rough drive back to Dili.  Not so fast Larry!  When we cracked open the equipment box, it appeared that this sensor was also non-functional.  The data stream was similar to a problem that occurred after the sensors were returned from their previous deployment in Morocco.  In that case, the sensors needed to be repaired at the factory in Canada.  I worried that we now had two sensors that required repair.  But, with great patience and careful assessment of the situation, we managed to determine that the cable connecting the sensor to the data logger was at fault.  This was only possible because we had pulled the equipment from Viqueque.  It turns out that (in an oddly curious way) we were lucky to have an extra set of equipment on hand.  We moved ahead with the servicing and data collection, and set out on the bone-crunching ride back to Same.  The main road was out of service, so we had to take an alternative route.  It is hard to find worse passage than the road from Same to Dili, but it is possible.  The road quality was about the same, but takes another hour to make the journey.  Fun times, but tempered by the fact that we made a full recovery of the Same station rather than pulling it and taking it back to Dili. 

A distant slope on the road back to Dili.  A clear change in rock type
can be seen across the lower topography and the grey steep slope above,
my inner geologist is happy to see evidence of active faulting.