AACSE: The Alaska Amphibious Community Seismic Experiment

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AACSE:  The Alaska Amphibious Community Seismic Experiment

A major shoreline-crossing community seismic experiment will take place in 2018-2019 spanning the Alaska Peninsula subduction zone. The purpose of this announcement is to alert the community to the scope of the final  funded project, the timetable for data availability, and opportunities to participate.

Plans for this project were developed at the 2014 Amphibious Array workshop (/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/AAFW-Report-2015.pdf) and in mid-2016 through a series of webinars, calls for comment, and other mechanisms to elicit broad community involvement. Alaska is a GeoPRISMS primary site, and an EarthScope target enhanced by deployment of Alaskan EarthScope Transportable Array (TA) seismic stations. The array covers a broad area that spans the incoming plate, the megathrust and volcanic arc to the distal backarc, with a dense trench-normal transect in the Kodiak region. The array spans the site of the largest 20th century volcanic eruption (Katmai 1912, VEI 6), the rupture area of the second largest recorded earthquake (Alaska 1964, M9.2+), and the creeping megathrust farther west. When integrated with the TA, the array extends 1500 km from the incoming plate to the Arctic coast and 700 km along strike.

AACSE includes 75 broadband OBSs and 30 land broadband sensors, recording for 15 months beginning May-June 2018. The OBSs include 20 “trawl-resistant” shielded sensors deployed in shallow water. Many OBSs include absolute pressure gauges to capture oceanographic signals, seafloor deformation and possible slow slip events. Eleven sites (five OBSs, six land) will include accelerometers to record large local earthquakes on scale, complementing permanent accelerometers in the area. All data from this experiment will be freely available immediately once acquired and processed into usable form, with the full dataset planned for availability in fall 2019.

We take advantage of this opportunity to help train and educate. The four OBS cruises (two in 2018 and two in 2019) will include numerous Apply-to-Sail berths made available to a wide range of applicants – graduate students, post-doc’s and other early career professionals, and more senior scientists with little-to-no OBS experience. Some berths are available to area educators. In addition, one of the cruises will have a suite of berths open to undergraduates, who will also participate in a short course before or after. Details on application will be forthcoming in winter 2017-8.

You can find information on the project web page, including a detailed deployment plan and map (/research/community-projects/alaska/). On that page you can find a “Subscribe” button to stay alerted to project updates – most future information will be only sent to those who sign up on the web page.

Upcoming presentations and discussions include:

Mark your calendars!

The AACSE PI Team:

Geoff Abers (Cornell University, abers@cornell.edu)

Douglas Wiens (Washington University in St Louis, doug@wustl.edu)

Susan Schwartz (UC Santa Cruz, syschwar@ucsc.edu)

Emily C. Roland (University of Washington, eroland@uw.edu)

Anne Sheehan (University of Colorado Boulder, anne.sheehan@colorado.edu)

Aubreya Adams (Colgate University, aadams@colgate.edu)

Donna Shillington (LDEO, Columbia University, djs@ldeo.columbia.edu)

Spahr Webb (LDEO, Columbia University, scw@ldeo.columbia.edu)

Peter Haeussler (USGS, pheuslr@usgs.gov)

Lindsay Worthington (University of New Mexico, lworthington@unm.edu)