Author: Robby Berman / Source: Big Think

- Most of the ocean floor is inaccessible to seismologists.
- Much can be learned about the inside of Earth by listening to earthquakes.
- Ingenious new floating sensors are changing the ocean seismology game.
They’re called MERMAIDs. They’re drifting seismometers that listen to movements of Earth’s crust pulsing through the waters of previously unmonitored reaches of the oceans, the two-thirds of the Earth that’s inaccessible to stationary seismic detectors.
Scientists can glean a tremendous amount of information from seismic data about the inside of the planet. If they have that data, that is. The first results of their journeys were published this week in Scientific Reports (paywall). They offer an unprecedented peek at what’s going on beneath the Galapagos.9 MERMAIDs floating free

Photo: Yann Hello, University of Nice
The MERMAID project is the brainchild of Princeton geoscientist Frederik Simons. “Imagine a radiologist forced to work with a CAT scanner that is missing two-thirds of its necessary sensors,” he tells Phys.org. He and colleague Guust Nolet have been developing their system for 15 years.
Each “MERMAID” is a floating seismometer/hydrophone set free to drift where it will, and together they form a seismographic network. (“MERMAID” stands for “Mobile Earthquake Recording in Marine Areas by Independent Divers.”) They generally float at a…
The post New MERMAID tech will help geoscientists discover the inside of planet Earth appeared first on FeedBox.