Newsletter #1 - June 12, 2003

Dear OATS Participant,

We just wanted to thank you again for letting us install a seismic station on your land, and let you know that your help and cooperation is greatly appreciated.

The project is going very well. Our installation trip last month was very successful, we plan to visit all the stations again in July to check that they are running OK and collect the first month’s worth of data. The data we have collected so far is, by researcher’s standards, excellent quality.

In the few days that followed setting up our stations we recorded two large earthquakes, a magnitude 6.8 event that occurred in Northern Algeria on May 21st, and a magnitude 5.9 event that occurred on May 23rd in Panama. Although the earthquakes were not felt in North America, the instruments we installed registered the ground vibrations very clearly, and a record of the Algerian earthquake is shown on the bottom of the page. An interesting aspect of this record is that the earthquake occurred at 6:44 pm, and was detected by our stations at 6:57 pm. This means it took 13 minutes for the earthquake waves to travel from Africa, through the earth, and reach our stations in Oregon! Seismic records like this will help us accomplish our goal of understanding what is happening to the Juan de Fuca plate under Oregon, and the structure of the earth beneath the Newberry Caldera.