Monday, February 29, 2016

Dare - first station serviced in Timor Leste

Rob and I collected six months of data from the Dare station in the hills outside of Dili today with lots of help from our IPG colleagues.  Rob got his first hint of road and weather conditions to come!  Rain and slippery red mud!  Fun!


Saturday, February 27, 2016

March 2016 service run - the calm before the storm

First little update on our progress. Flights done for now. We've got 8 stations to service in Timor Leste, so let the fun begin!
The above video is a little rough; I don't have my usual video editing software on our field computers, so I've got to get everything in one take from my phone. Hope more of the future ones are a touch more scenic than a hotel room!

Saturday, February 20, 2016

Spring 2016 service coming up!

Hi all! New blogger, Rob, here, just getting ready for a service run in March 2016. We're starting the service in Timor Leste, with Prof. Miller and I servicing stations in the young country with our hosts and collaborators at IPG. Once we've collected the data from those stations, I'm heading to Kupang to meet with Nova and tour around the Indonesia stations. I'm planning to try and vlog during the trip, such as my summer in Japan (https://www.youtube.com/user/rwporritt/videos), to hopefully give a new media element to this blog. I may be limited by available technology and internet access, but I'll try to put together a video or two per week of the 4-5 week trip.

A little more about me: I've known Leland since 2007 when we worked together on a field deployment in northern California. An interesting coincidence of that northern California project is that it had three PIs from three different institutions: my PhD advisor, Leland's PhD advisor, and one of Meghan's Postdoc advisors. A couple years after that project, the three of us (re-)united at USC for a couple years of sciencing. As a scientist my interests are pretty broad within structural seismology. I've done imaging at the scale of the crust and upper mantle (maximum depth of ~50-100 km) and at larger scales down below the mantle transition zone (~670 km depth). Spanning these scales gives me a really unique and I think strong view of the subduction process, which is really what drives the plate tectonic cycle. Recently, my focus has been on an ambient noise tomography based model of the Banda region from our data. I'm heading to the field in a couple days, but the plan is to have a paper based on that model submitted before I go.

Cheers!