Minutes

International Ocean Networks (ION)

Breakfast Meeting

December 12, 2007 (AGU)

San Francisco

Attendees:

Ralph Stephen (Chair)

Keir Becker

Peter Bromirski

Rhett Butler

Adam Dziewonski

Fred Duennebier

Jean Paul Montagner

Garry Rogers

Barbara Romanowicz

Adam Schultz

ION is co-sponsoring with IASPEI a Special Session on “Underwater Observatories” (JSS016) at the 2007 IUGG meeting in Perugia (July 2-13, 2007). The deadline for abstract submissions to the meeting was extended from January 15 to February 28. One abstract has been submitted so far. Adam and Barbara agreed to be the ION points-of-contact for this session.

Progress reports were presented by the various attendees as follows:

Ralph Stephen – Ralph became the ION Chair officially in July 2007 through an email process. This was his first meeting as Chair. We were working on getting the ION web site organized and in resolving confusion in the links with Berkeley and Oregon.

- ION had co-sponsored with IASPEI a Special Session on “Underwater Observatories” (JSS016) at the 2007 IUGG meeting in Perugia (July 2-13, 2007). This was a great success. ION was also co-sponsoring two proposed sessions at the 2009 IASPEI meeting in Cape Town (January 10-16, 2009): “Extending land networks into the sea and oceans” and “Re-using ODP boreholes and submarine cables”.

- ION had also co-sponsored a workshop in Tokyo on borehole observatories for NanTroSEIZE (November 28-29, 2007).

- The April/June 2006 Issue of Annals of Geophysics, a Special Issue dedicated to Giuseppe Smriglio, entitled “From Land Networks to Seafloor Observatories” contained many interesting papers by ION members and others on international seafloor observatory programs.

- the ION proposal to IODP-MI (631-Pre) is still active.

A proposal has been submitted to US-NSF for a workshop to discuss joint science goals between NSF Earth and Ocean Science divisions.

Keir Becker – IODP-MI faces reduced drilling time on both platforms, the JOIDES Resolution and the Chikyu. Funding constraints are also making it tough for observatory efforts at the Juan de Fuca CORKs and on NanTroSEIZE. Microbiology observatories are being planned for the mid-Atlantic Ridge (395A and a new hole) and in the Mariana forearc.

Fred Duennebier – The relaying of the (Hawaii-4) seafloor communications cable to station ALOHA (about 60km long) was a success. There is 96KHz telemetry on two channels. A hydrophone has been installed with a bandwidth down to 100Hz. It would be good if someone would champion the installation of a broadband seismometer at Aloha.

Adam Dziewonski – Expressed his disappointment that US seafloor observatory efforts were not proceeding more quickly.

Barbara Romanowicz – The MOBB has been installed for a five year deployment. It will be hooked-up to the MARS cable in Spring ’08. There is a back-up battery operated system to acquire data when the cable is not attached or is not working.

Jean Paul Montagner - Planning for an observatory at NERO (the Ninety-East Ridge in the Indian Ocean) have been postponed indefinitely. The ANTARES project is working well with two seismometers. Roland Person is active in the ESONET program.

Rhett Butler – A policy has been established for OBSIP to release the data from at least one OBS immediately after recovery to the IRIS DMS for all of their experiments.

Garry Rogers - Although Garry was not yet a member of ION he was invited to the meeting to give an up-date on progress with Neptune Canada. This is summarized in the attachment below.