The Salton Seismic Imaging project is a large-scale seismic reflection and refraction survey that took place in southeastern California in March, 2011. The project involved deployment of seismometers in over 4000 locations to record more than 100 borehole explosions, and was a collaboration among Caltech, Virginia Tech, and the US Geological Survey.  Drilling started in October of 2010 and seismometer deployments in late February, 2011.  A complementary project with investigators from UC San Diego and University of Nevada, Reno placed ocean-bottom seismometers underwater in the Salton Sea to record the borehole explosions.  The UCSD project also used airguns (pulses of compressed air) to create additional seismic sources to be recorded by the seismometers both on land and under water.

Calibration shots involving only a small equipment deployment were conducted near Calexico, California in late June 2009.

Caltech students who participated in the earlier phases of this project include:
4 graduate students, one undergraduate, and one MIT undergraduate.

In addition. the Caltech/UCLA field geophysics class in March 2009 collected some data relevant to this project.  The March 2010 class collected  more data relevant to this project.  In addition, a field geophysics class (Ge211) with 5 graduate students was involved in the main field deployment in Winter Term 2011.

During the field deployments in March 2011 we had graduate and undergraduate student participants (and a few postdocs) from a number of schools including:  Caltech, Virginia Tech, UCLA, UCSD, San Diego State, Cal State San Bernardino, Cal State Bakersfield, Cal State Long Beach, Imperial Valley College, Cuesta College, Allen Hancock College, Santa Monica College, UC Berkeley, Western Washington University, University of Washington, Arizona State University, Ohio State University, and North Carolina Central University.  Mexican student participants were from University of Sonora and University of Zacatecas.

This project is funded by NSF-Margins, NSF-Earthscope, and the USGS Multihazards project.