Shatsky, see you in five days!

Since we started our voyage (#MGL1206) on R/V Marcus G. Langseth from Guam in the morning of Mar 24, 2012, it will take us about five days transit to the research site: Shatsky Rise. This is Sam writing this blog, a PhD student from Texas A&M university. Exciting to visit Shatsky again this year. Yes, I say "again" because I sailed on Langseth for 60 days in 2010, shooting seismic over Shatsky Rise. Actually, this cruise is a second leg of the 2010 cruise to finish up the multi-channel seismic data collection. I have been working with Dr Will Sager since fall 2009, in a study of the structure of Shatsky Rise oceanic plateau for my PhD degree. As you can tell from the above, I am kind of familiar with Shatsky Rise, R/V Marcus G. Langseth and seismic research cruise. One thing I can tell you is that Shatsky Rise is interesting enough to study due to various scientific rationale. As one of the largest oceanic plateau around the world, Shatsky Rise is important to exploring processes of basaltic volcanism and the formation and evolution of oceanic plateaus. However, it's poorly understood because it's submarine and in remote location from land, which makes it difficult to sample and study. But science is going on and that's why we are trying hard to acquire geophysical data in order to reveal the mysterious facts inside Shatsky Rise.


I will process the multi-channel seismic (MCS) data during this cruise with the help of ProMAX, which is a popular seismic processing program in industry. I still can remember my first time to use ProMAX to process marine seismic data is when I was on Langseth in 2010. Comparing to conventinal land seismic data processing which I used to work on before I came to US, marine seismic is relatively simpler. But we still need to be very careful to make sure things working well. Anyway, I have already got the experience on how to process MCS data from 2010 cruise, what I am going to do for this cruise is to basically apply the same flows and repeat the work once again.

Here is a picture showing the processing workstation I set up in the main lab on Langseth ship, and we named it Carina. It's sitting there quietly right now and waiting for the MCS data coming in after 5-day transit to the site.