We now have deployed 23 and recovered 17 ocean bottom seismometers, leaving only three more to deploy and one to recover. This means we are due to finish two days earlier than planned (on schedule for arrival back into port on Wednesday evening). The weather has taken a slight turn for the worse again, and I have suffered from a couple bouts of seasickness. Fortunately, we have been blessed with amazing sunrises and sunsets.
Now that we have recovered some seismometers, we have been able to look at some initial results from the 12 months that the seismometers have been at the seabed. We have been able to find some micro-earthquakes at the southern end of the Cascadia subduction zone. We also found that the seismometers were able to record the seismic waves from a damaging magnitude 6.0 earthquake that hit Napa, California on 24 August 2014. Our initial results show that the recording quality of the instruments is good and they will provide crucial information to unravel the character of the Cascadia megathrust fault and may provide an insight into the regional tectonic structure of the Western United States and Eastern Pacific rim.