The Monterey Ocean Bottom Broadband project (MOBB) is a collaborative project between the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory (BSL) at UC Berkeley. Its goal is to install and operate a three-component broadband seismic station as well as related instrumentation, on the seafloor in Monterey Bay, 40 km offshore, as part of the Berkeley Digital Seismic Network. This station represents the first step towards extending the on-shore broadband earthquake monitoring network in California to the sea side of the North-America/Pacific plate boundary, enabling a more detailed study of the latter's structural characteristics and dynamics.
The successful deployment took place April 9-11, 2002, and the station is currently recording seismic data autonomously. Eventually, it could be linked to the proposed MARS cable and provide real-time, continuous seismic data to be merged with the rest of the northern California real time seismic system.
The data will be available on-line at the Northern California Earthquake Data Center (NCEDC).
This project follows on the 1997 MOISE experiment, in which a similar system was deployed in a similar manner (with the help of MBARI's Point Lobos ship and ROV Ventana) for a period of 3 months in a similar location in Monterey Bay. During the MOISE experiment, much experience was gained on the technological aspects of such deployments which contributed to the success of the present installation.
The MOBB project is supported by funds to MBARI from the Lucile and David Packard Foundation, the National Science Foundation and UC Berkeley funds to BSL.
- Why Do We Need MOBB?
- MOBB People and Institutions
- MOBB Instruments and Deployment
- Selected Events Detected by MOBB
- Seismicity in the Monterey Region
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