Post #9 iMUSH

July 27, 2014

The first part of iMUSH project has been completed. For three days, deployment teams went out and placed seismographs strategically around Mt. St. Helens. Charlene Batchelor, my teammate, and I considered ourselves lucky because we were on the main "X" line that went from basically the base of Mt. St. Helens outwards in a northwest direction. On our first day the views were stunning. Here is a picture:

After hundreds of these seismographs were placed, another team had the task of setting off "shots" or explosions in predetermined locations. I was at the first shot, where over a 1,000 pounds of explosives was set off. It create quite a thump and generated the equivalent of a magnitude 2 earthquake on the Richter scale. The shot team left quickly after this, because they had a series of explosions to set off in other locations. The next location they went to the explosion created a large crater. I will try and get pictures of this.

The seismic waves set off by these explosions were recorded by the seismographs we had placed. Now our task was to retreive the seismographs and bring them back to the instrument center where all the information could be downloaded. It went a lot faster picking up the seismographs.

Here are the seismographs, which are called Texans, being prepped for the first deployment:

Here are the boxes of Texans set out for the deployment teams. There are 15 Texans per box, and each Texan costs around $3,000!