OK Earthquakes!!

On Wednesday I was lucky enough to be able to go to the field and deploy seismometers to monitor the earthquake activity. Seems like everything has been tapering off, so that's good news, but I did feel another one last night at 1130. Yikes! Here are some pictures of the seismometers, they are little canisters that we were burying, and then all the electronics sit outside the hole in a pelican box with a solar panel that is used to recharge the marine battery that runs the stuff. These are telemetry, they (the geologic survey and my other colleagues at the school of geology) have to come back out to the field and download the data manually. These will probably sit out in the field for three months or so, barring no more earthquakes!

We were driving trying to find a particular location, and we drove over a ground rupture in a road along the fault! We know it was due to the fault because along the margins of the fault there were little "mud volcanoes", which form during the quake when mud is forced up through the rupture.

This particular deployment was with equipment from PASSCAL, which is an NSF funded endeavor at New Mexico Tech. You can essentially "rent" all kinds of geophysical equipment from them, a really awesome place. So they sent OU 10 seismometers to put out along the fault. Some students and a prof from OSU also came out to help us. We also were helped out by some local critters, as you'll see in the pics. One tried to hitch a ride back with us...let me tell you, I think she would work harder than some of the people around here :)

All in all its been a pretty exciting/scary week. This fault system was last active over 300 million years ago, and looks like the most recent activity is starting to taper off. Earthquakes are not unusual here in OK, and lots of research will be ongoing from this latest 'swarm' of events.