We are leaving the Lucky Strike volcano and hydrothermal vents after an eventful 4-week cruise during which we successfully reinstalled all the components of the EMSO-Azores standalone seafloor observatory:
-the two seafloor SEAMON (Sea Monitoring) stations and their connected instruments: a 3-components seismometer and a hydrophone for seismic event detection, two pressure probes for geodetic measurements, a video camera, a dissolved-iron analyzer, and an optode (oxygen and temperature probe) for ecological time studies.
- the BOREL transmission buoy, equipped with GPS (geodetic experiment and buoy location) and meteo station.
Everybody on board worked very hard for this success!
The system is improved compared to last year, with new lower consumption acoustic modems, a revised earthquake detection software, more solar panels and a new GPS for the buoy. It transmits data every 6 hours to the ESONET-EMSO data node at the SISMER in Brest. Data from Lucky Strike have been available there for a year now. Our next effort will be to offer a more user friendly web interface to visualize and access the Azores node near realtime data set.
Mathilde Cannat, Jérome Blandin, Pierre Marie Sarradin (co-chiefs of the MoMARsat 2011 cruise)
