June 15, 2015 - The beginning

And so it begins. It's June 15, 2015 and I am driving to Greenville, NC to the East Carolina University West Research Campus, the facility that has graciously agreed to host us and our temporary instrument center for the 2015 Eastern North America Margin (ENAM) seismic experiment. There I will meet Dan Lizarralde and his student Hannah Mark, who have been here since Friday to "drive the lines" and make sure that the roads Dan and I selected last fall for deployment are still in good shape.

It's hot (104F!), remarkably so even for this part of the country at this time of the year. Nobody is on the road. I take the familiar exit off of 264 on Mozingo Rd. 

I know this place well. We were here last fall to acquire data for the other components of the ENAM project (see "About the ENAM Community Seismic Experiment").

This summer we will acquire the last part of the project, the land active-source seismic data.

I arrive at the ECU campus and find Dan and Hannah in one of the rooms we will use for our deployment. 

Dan is planning strategies for the incoming acquisition, Hannah is showing me how she thinks we should rearrange the chairs to make more space for the instruments. We will need enough room for 720 small seismometers, sensors and all additional equipment, about 48 large cargo boxes total. Hmmm.. it's going to be snug. 

We clean up the room, kick the chairs out of there and head to town. It's time to go shopping for everything we will need the next three weeks to deploy 1440 seismometers along two 250 km-long profiles and record 11 400lb explosions.