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Building a Geophysical Earth Observatory for Ice-Covered Environments (GEOICE)
  • +9
  • Justin Sweet,
  • Audrey Huerta,
  • Jeremy Winberry,
  • Kent Anderson,
  • Bruce Beaudoin,
  • Susan Bilek,
  • Paul Carpenter,
  • Kevin Nikolaus,
  • Aurora Roth,
  • Kirsten Arnell,
  • Narendra Lingutla,
  • Robert Woodward
Justin Sweet
IRIS

Corresponding Author:justin.sweet@iris.edu

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Audrey Huerta
Central Washington University
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Jeremy Winberry
Central Washington Univ
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Kent Anderson
IRIS
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Bruce Beaudoin
IRIS PASSCAL Instrument Center
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Susan Bilek
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
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Paul Carpenter
IRIS PASSCAL Instrument Center
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Kevin Nikolaus
IRIS PASSCAL Instrument Center
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Aurora Roth
IRIS PASSCAL Instrument Center
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Kirsten Arnell
IRIS PASSCAL Instrument Center
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Narendra Lingutla
IRIS PASSCAL Instrument Center
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Robert Woodward
IRIS
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Abstract

The GEOICE project was a collaborative instrumentation development effort funded by NSF and undertaken by Central Washington University, New Mexico Tech, and the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS). Born out of a desire to facilitate additional seismic exploration of polar regions, the GEOICE project developed a multi-modal pool of seismic equipment for deployments in harsh polar environments, with the signature capability of recording the seismic wavefield with minimal aliasing. The completed instrumentation set is available as a community resource which expands on the IRIS PASSCAL Polar instrument pool. A significant amount of effort was put into testing the new equipment pool by the staff at the IRIS PASSCAL Instrument Center. Over the past several years this included both testing at the facility, as well as field testing of sensors, data loggers, and power systems in Alaska and Antarctica. The final equipment pool consists of 10 posthole polar-rated broadbands, 55 compact posthole polar-rated broadbands, 65 next-generation polar-rated dataloggers, and 200 all-in-one nodal-style high-frequency seismometers. Through a combination of design and form-factor, this pool will expand on and improve the instrumentation needed to perform high-quality seismic investigations of Earth’s ice-covered regions with reduced logistics and power requirements, while enabling spatially dense observations over a very wide frequency range. This new instrumentation can be used to study a variety of phenomena in ice-covered regions, recording signals from the solid Earth, glacier movement, liquid water flow and other relevant signals. Thus, these instruments will be a key tool for making observations of the interaction of the solid Earth with the cryosphere and atmosphere to better understand how drivers such as climate change impacts these systems.