Ocean-Bottom Instrumentation Consortium awards

(23 January 2008)

The Ocean-Bottom Instrumentation Consortium has received two major NERC awards. It has been awarded £65,250 by the NERC, as the provider of its Ocean-Bottom Instrumentation Facility, to enhance the data recording capabilities of a number of its ocean-bottom seismograph dataloggers to support a facility provision investigating the origin of the Sumatra great earthquakes. It has been awarded £325,000 by the NERC, as the provider of its Ocean-Bottom Instrumentation Facility, as a 50% contribution to the costs of increasing the number of its ocean-bottom seismographs from 27 to 50 by the end of 2009 to support two facility provisions investigating (1) the origin and processes of continental rifting to the accretion of ocean crust and (2) the effect of large-scale topography on subduction. This will act as the first stage in the development of multi-sensor, contemporaneously recording platforms, whose ultimate use may be as long-time frame seabed observatories.