The oceans cover about 71% of the Earth's surface, yet our current picture of the structure and dynamics of the oceanic crust and mantle is mainly based on seismic data recorded in the continents or on noisy ocean islands.
Detailed seismic observations of the ocean and of sub-oceanic Earth’s interior require ocean bottom seismometers (OBS), but large OBS experiments - both in numbers of instruments and area covered - remain a major endeavour due to technical, logistical and financial challenges. A zoo of temporary OBS arrays and other passive ocean-bottom geophysics, OBG (e.g., magnetotelluric, geodesy) has been deployed in the last two decades. This led to fascinating new discoveries worldwide, from exciting earthquake phenomena (e.g., unexpected back-propagation of ruptures, slow slip events) to new constraints on subduction processes, mantle plumes, ridges, transform faults, thermal heterogeneity and volatile cycling. Despite great technological advances and improved data processing procedures, some challenges persist. For example, the sharing and application of best practices for OBG deployments, data preprocessing and formatting is still limited. Many processed data sets are not released for years (if at all), limiting the long-term impact and sustainability of data from these expensive, often publicly-funded projects. With recent large scale OBS arrays starting to change this picture by sharing data and practices (e.g., PacificArray, Rhum-Rum, UPFLOW) and with the expansion of OBS pools (e.g., UK’s OBIC, Canada’s NSFI), it is now timely to gather the marine geophysics community to discuss the state-of-the-art and ways forward.
In this meeting, we invite contributions from the global ocean-bottom geophysics community to share knowledge, experience, scientific achievements from OBG experiments and future directions. We welcome reflections on all aspects from early-stage planning, instrumentation development, experiment design, pre- and post-data processing and analysis (e.g., software, machine learning tools), to new scientific results (e.g., tomography, receiver functions, ambient noise studies, earthquake source analysis, active source imaging, etc). We encourage contributions in all relevant areas, such as from seafloor environmental sensors (e.g., using submarine fibre cables), magnetotellurics, geodesy, ocean acoustics, oceanography and marine biology. We also aim to discuss future large scale seafloor initiatives, notably in the Atlantic.
Organisers:
Ana Ferreira (UCL)
Tim Henstock (Univ. Southampton)
Stephen Hicks (UCL)
Mike Kendall (Univ. Oxford)
Neil Mitchell (Univ. Manchester)