Alor stations - solar panels installed!

Nova just completed the servicing and solar panel installation at our two seismic stations on Alor!  

Next stop, Timor-Leste and the 8 stations there!

AOGS meeting in Singapore - talking about the GWB project

I'm in Singapore this week for the AOGS meeting to present our work on establishing earthquake monitoring in Timor-Leste, which is funded by the SEG's Geoscientists Without Borders Program.  

Puzzling fieldwork

Sailor Cat needs to bring a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage across the river.
The boat is tiny and can only carry one passenger at a time.
If he leaves the wolf and the goat alone together, the wolf will eat the goat.
If he leaves the goat and the cabbage alone together, the goat will eat the cabbage.
How can he bring all three safely across the river?

This is a fun little puzzle, but its analogous logistical fieldwork quandary we are dealing with. We have 12 stations on 4 islands. Each station has a dead battery and we need to replace the dead batteries with recharged batteries. In order to charge a battery, we need to leave it for 12+ hours at a hotel/port and can only charge 1 battery at a time. Each station has a different travel time from each port. How do we design 4 separate circuit diagrams, one per island, to visit each station and swap its dead battery for a charged battery?

Rob and Nova outside the plane after landing in Waingapu (Sumba)

Rob and Elen (our MVP!) in the Neo Hotel lobby

Driving around Sumba

Chocolate avacado drink :D

Riding side-sadle on a motorbike. Its normal.

Crispy banana.

http://www.mathcats.com/explore/river/crossing.html

Goodbye Dili! For now?

6 stations done, 14 to go! This past week I've been touring around Timor Leste with Atoy - the lead mechanic for IPG, an awesome driver, and a pretty fun guy, even if we do have a bit of a language barrier. Now I'm preparing to fly to the Oecussi station Saturday morning, where I'll meet Teo and Atoy. Its a complicated station because Oecussi is separated from Dili by Indonesian land and visas are complicated. But once we get this station done, I'm done with Timor Leste for this trip. Its an interesting country and really makes me think about history and infrastructure and society. It'd really be great if everyone in the more developed world had a chance to visit here for perspective. But I think that window may be closing soon because I think this country is really developing quite quickly. For instance, I've been spending the last couple days in Dili working on trying to figure out how to telemeter some seismic stations. They're almost there and just need a little help to configure dataloggers to send data through the cellular network to their office in Dili.


Little 3 minute video with photos from the first leg of the trip:
https://youtu.be/4esPvNeFIJQ

Beautiful mountain valley on the road from Same to DIli

A waterfall along the road from Same to Dili

Atoy and me at lunch near Same

Rob and Nova, back for a service run

Hi, Rob here. I'm back in Dili for a service run of our stations in Timor Leste and then to service some new stations from Australia. Nova and I were on a flight together from Seoul to Bali, but we split so she could go visit family for a while in Jakarta while I take care of Timor Leste. We'll meet up soon to do a few stations in Indonesia.

Nothing too much to report. I've serviced our station in Dare and in Atauro and both were working well. Now I'm taking some downtime before preparing for a 4 station run around eastern Timor Leste with Atouy before coming back for Maliana and Oceussi stations.

Getting ready to take a motorboat from the ferry to Atauro

My first coconut of the trip! Cut by the village leader in Atauro.

And the after picture...

I forget what this is called, but the yellow, spiced rice is served in this wrap made of palm leaves. Very tasty.

Yes, this is a picture looking out on the clearest blue sea from a little island paradise.

The demob begins!

Cooper and Nova arrived back in Kupang today and are getting ready to start the long process of removing the 22 instruments from the Indonesian component of the Banda Arc array.

Fortunately, we secured additional funding from the Society of Exploration Geophysicists - Geoscientists Without Boarders to keep the 8 seismometers deployed in Timor-Leste for another year.

Stay tuned to hear about our demob adventures!

Rote - the service run sunset

We're done! All the stations have been checked, data has been downloaded, and the data and I are ready to return to LA. Nova's been great this whole trip and it would be hard to say goodbye, so instead we're saying sumpai jumpa lagi (see you soon!)

Since the last blog update, we've finished Flores and enjoyed ginger coffee with a sunset. Then, short stop in Kupang before we flew immediately to Rote. On Rote, we had two stations to do. One of the Rote stations is located on an amazing oceanside resort so we couldn't help but stay a couple nights there.

On the way to Ende, we found and tried fresh durian. Despite all the fear around the fruit, it was actually pretty tasty and didn't smell at all.

From Ende, where we enjoyed fried bananas and ginger coffee.

Relaxing in Rote with the job done.

One last sunset (and bintang)

The calm before the final storm

Sumba's done and we're resting back home in Kupang. Tomorrow morning (Monday) we have an early flight to Lahunbajo in western Flores. That starts our last major hurtle - 5 stations on 1 island including a station with clearly bad data. We'll do what we can to try and fix it, but we may just decide to pull it and store the equipment to save time and money for the demobilization. Once western Flores is done, we'll touch down back in Kupang before going to the last island, Rote.

Couple quick videos we took on the way to our last Sumba site:

I got to be supervisor as Nova and the station manager put the tarp back over the station box.

On the plane from Waingapu to Kupang...

Sumba day 1

We've just finished 2 stations on Sumba, leaving 1 for tomorrow. Stations looked pretty good, but all of these q330 stations seem to be giving me a curveball to test me. The first station had a little problem with the GPS - seems like it has a somewhat weak antenna and we had it pointed down. We flipped the antenna up and out and then forced the GPS to relock and bingo, we got it working happily. The GPS is really just used for a clock; the digitizer (q330) has an internal clock which drifts slightly. So, every few minutes to hours, it wakes up a GPS antenna to get accurate timing information from the satellites. The second station had one of its "booms" out of position. The instruments are basically a set of capacitive plates and what we really do is measure the voltage needed to keep those plates at a constant distance. The boom for one of these plates was not quite aligned within our tolerance zone, so we sent a recenter. But no response was seen on our handheld communication device (clié). So we did a manual recenter with the connecting box and it centered nicely.

Little video recorded between the stations. It is really striking how different Flores and Timor are compared with northeastern Sumba!

Indonesia service half done!

It has been quite a fruitful week since I met up with Nova and started the service in Nusa Tengarra Timur (NTT). We've serviced all 4 stations on Indonesian Timor, 2 stations on Alor, 2 stations in eastern Flores, 2 stations in Lembata, and just today did a quick round trip to/from the 1 station in Savu. Tomorrow we head for 3 stations in Sumba, then back to our homebase in Kupang before heading to 5 stations in western Flores, and then finishing with 2 stations in Rote. Much of the logistics is dictated by availability of flights and boat rides, but so far things have worked well. We're setting off very early, usually taking flights at 6 or 7am and then getting to our first site by 8am or so. Getting the sites done early in the day is working great. If we wait too long, the sun gets unbearable until the rains come down and make the roads impassible. So we're a little short on sleep, but not on Bintang (the local pilsner you can find in a large bottle).

Met some friendly guys working at the hotel in Atambua, which is a border town between Indonesian Timor and Timor Leste.

Q330 balers in the hotel room, getting prepped for the field (Fight on!)

Nova reading to a future geophysicist :)

In Larantuka on the eastern end of Flores

Nova and I posing for selfy with some girls from a site on Lembata

At lunch in Kupang at a traditional pork restaurant with our hero, Elen.

Probably one of the more unique highlights: we had a radio interview! Huge thanks to Nova for translating and making sure we didn't say anything incorrect :D.

On the little plane to Savu. I've never had so much leg room!

And now for the audio-video part of the blog:

After the first night of work in Indonesia. We had two sites; the first was great, but the second was during a downpour, which of course ended once we were done.

From the road, en route to our second station on the second day in Lelogama. Turns out we didn't have the right equipment, so just did a quick power check and then returned a couple days later.

From the boat between eastern Flores to Lembata.

In the radio station, just before the live broadcasting!

Videos from the road

Just wanted to post a few short video clips. This first one is just to give you a sense of the ferry ride between Dili and Ocuessi:

This next one I recorded while waiting for Teo and Atoy to get me in Ocuessi:

Next was in the hotel room in Soe after servicing two stations (one in some pretty bad rain!)

Finally, on the way to our last station in west Timor. The video is surprisingly steady considering the road conditions ^_^.

Timor Leste completed and western Timor nearly done!

Checking in from our home away from home in Kupang. We're one station away from being completely done with the island of Timor and plan to get that done Sunday. Tomorrow/Saturday we're heading to/from the island of Alor to take care of stations there. Looks like our schedule is pretty well setup to island hop around for the next week or two.

Met a new friend in Dili. He spoke a little English and helped me get on the right boat.

Met some new friends in the hotel at Atambua. 

Sunsetting from the balcony in Kupang

What's a field deployment without q330's in the hotel room (Go Trojans!)

Waiting in Dili

We're unable to get to our last two stations until Monday, so I'm just waiting around in Dili. This has given me a little chance to check some data and I thought I'd make a nice little record section of a big earthquake from the Bonin Islands which was picked up on the last trip.

Each wiggle is a different station in the Banda Arc array. They are sorted by distance and filtered to show signals from 10 to 100 seconds period. You can clearly see the first arriving P wave on the far left, then a series of bumps associated with bounces off the core. Eventually there's the S wave and then a simple surface wave. 

I had a little walk around the north shore of Timor and noticed some beautiful outcrops. Looks like a blueschist faces schist; this is part of the mélange unit within the Banda Terrane. I'm somewhat reminded of the Franciscan unit found throughout California and makes me wonder if there's a similar tectonic history, just shifted in time.

The water is calm and beautiful. I especially love the mountains jutting out into the sea.

Finally, here's a couple "talk to the camera" videos I took as I walked around the north coast. Sorry they're a bit shaky; my phone is not an ideal video camera.

Back to Dili and wifi after a tour of Timor Leste with Teo and Antouy. We collected 4 more stations of data (all looking good!) and helped bus tens of children to school on the way. The views were just spectacular and the food is great. We felt an earthquake Thursday night while staying in Same; it was a magnitude 5.5 in the Timor sea (just south of Timor). For better or worse, it was after we had collected the data, so now I won't be able to see seismograms of the event until Monday night when we collect the data from the last two Timor Leste stations!

Antouy (Antonio the mechanic and driver) vs. a coconut

My thoughts after feeling the M5.5 in the Timor Sea

Atauro Island Adventures

Rob and I made a whirlwind trip to Atauro island in just one day to retrieve the data from station TL03.




It is the noisiest station (no surprise from the photo here!!), but is probably our favorite because of the beautiful location and wonderful transport 35 km across the sea from Dili with Compass Charters.







Despite being such a noisy station, it still records beautiful seismograms like the one Rob is looking at (10 minutes after we switched out the data cards!) from the M6.7 January 3rd event from India.

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!

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!

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!

Back to Flores and Kelimutu volcano

Entering the stretch run of field work, we were joined by my lovely wife Maggie.  We began in central Flores in the town of Ende and visited four stations. Three were working in perfect order, and one was having multiple problems.  Three visits later, one severed GPS cable and a recharging of the battery, and some issues with a torrential downpour led to a successful stabilization of our station near Borong

Maggie in full supervisor mode.  Full immersion in mud
was required to restore this station.

This hard battle provided excellent context to take a short detour towards Kelimutu National Park.  Absolutely spectacular.  This volcanic center hosts three crater lakes of different colors, representing one of the well-known jewels of the Nusa Tenggara province. Starting from the adjacent village of Moni at 5am, we made it to the top of the park for a misty sunrise.  A bit later, the sun cracked through and the volcano was revealed in full glory. 

Nova and Maggie

The central crater lake

Central and lower lake