News

The SIIOS Demobilization Team (who will collect our data and dig out our icy worlds seismic sensors) arrived in Greenland after a very troubled journey...and then had to wait for days for the right conditions, and their turn, to get into the field site. At least we have cute entertainment while we cool our heals in Thule - Mini arctic foxes! Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Jaime Lannister from Game of Thrones, was also in Greenland and brightened up the wait! This blog post is by Field Safety Officer, Suz, who reached Thule Airbase first and had the longest to wait...

Being a rock-star planetary seismologist isn’t all glitz and glamour you know! Being safe in the field and getting great data takes a lot of careful preparation. This can be frustrating when you are raring to go out into the field. Today’s post is written by Natalie Wagner, an undergraduate research assistant studying geophysics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

In Part 2, Suz tells us about their arrival at the field site, including testing for unstable ice bridges and crevasses!  Good weather and some careful helicopter pilots helped to make the reconnaissance journey smooth for Erin and Suz.  The field site checks out!  We have our GO to deploy! 

No one wants to helicopter into the middle of a desolate ice field with a sub-glacial lake *somewhere* underneath it, unpack gear, set up tents and THEN find out you are in the wrong place!  So, the SIIOS Installation Team left nothing to chance and sent our Field Campaign Lead, Erin, and Team Mountaineer, Suz, out on reconnaissance.  Today’s post is written by Suz, who tells us about the goals and preparation for their reconnaissance mission. 

While the team is deep in the middle of nowhere, we have a few posts written by the Installation Team members before deployment.  Today’s post is by Brad Avenson, our sensor design engineer, who tells us about the "Huddle Test" - a full test of the seismometers before we take them into the field.  

Only 10 days to go now!! 

After the Installation Team is helicoptered into the field site, we’ll be setting up our tents and the seismometer stations, some up to a kilometer away from the tents, in sub-zero temperatures and in gusts of wind up to 100 mph!  I have trouble setting up a tent at the best of times, but trying to set up a wind-blown tent, with all of its fiddly little bits, while wearing big thick gloves and ski-goggles so you can’t see or feel anything properly!? No one is looking forward to that! So, we have been getting ready by practicing setting up our equipment in a more sheltered environment... 

It is highly unlikely that we will meet polar bears during our time in the field.  But, that is certainly a situation for which we ought to be well prepared!  We’ve been preparing for our worst-case scenarios under the guidance of our Personnel Safety Officer, Suz, who has decades of global experience as a mountaineer and has served as a senior member of the U.S. Antarctic Program Search and Rescue team for ten seasons...

Europa and Enceladus are cold and distant icy moons with subsurface oceans that orbit around Jupiter and Saturn (respectively). They don’t have a thick atmosphere with winds and weather like Earth, and are much, much colder. So, we can’t truly test the Seismometer to Investigate Ice and Ocean Structure (SIIOS) in a similar environment on Earth. The best we can do is to head to somewhere very cold, that has ice above liquid water…  

There are three main groups to the Seismometer to Investigate Ice and Ocean Structure (SIIOS) team:  1) Those working to get a seismometer ready for the icy moons of the outer solar system, 2) the geniuses building it and 3) those field-testing our work. You can find out more about all the members of our SIIOS Team page.

Today, let’s meet the intrepid adventurers who will be going into the wilds of Greenland this month (May 2018) to test the SIIOS and taking over our Twitter feed during their time “in the field”.

So much to tell you! Where to start?  Before we detail our preparations to go into the freezing ice fields of Greenland, and why I’ve suddenly developed an intense interest in big guns and electric fences (!!), let’s start at the beginning:  The WHAT and the WHY...