Instructors: Joann Stock, Rob Clayton, Bruce Luyendyk (UCSB)

This class is being offered now, in fall term 2006. The class involved 14 days of field work aboard a research ship offshore New Zealand, in October. The students work on collecting and analyzing data on gravity, magnetics, and swath bathymetry, and also do general watchstanding, during the course of the cruise.  A main objective of the cruise was to test a multichannel streamer ; analysis of marine seismic reflection data is also part of the curriculum.  Lectures on these techniques and instruction on data collection and initial data processing were given in a daily one-hour class meeting during the cruise. The student work involves problem sets, an oral presentation, and a written report on some aspect of the data.  

This course is also listed as Geology 181 in the UC Santa Barbara course listing for fall 2006.

This course is suitable for graduate students or junior /senior undergraduates. Permission of the instructors is required. As of late August, the participant list has already been finalized and our roster is full, so we cannot take any more students.

Information on past course offerings from 2001 and 2002 is available here.

General information about logistics for Oct. 2006

The textbook recommended for the class is "Marine Geophysics" by E J W Jones, published by Wiley Interscience. This has been ordered and should shortly be available in the Caltech bookstore in the class textbook section. 

Each student is expected to read background material prior to and during the cruise. Each student was assigned a particular topic (see the topic list and reading list ). The students each prepared a 15 minute talk on their topic and gave this talk to the other students during the cruise.

Each student is also expected to write up a short report on some aspect of the data collected during the cruise. The assignments of data to students will be done on board as the data are collected. For Caltech students, these reports will be due on Friday, Dec. 1, 2006.

The Caltech weekly class meeting is on Tuesday from 9-10 a.m. in room 215 North Mudd.

Last updated:  November 7, 2006.

Map showing our cruise tracks on the Chatham Rise E of New Zealand. Seismi lines are in red. Seismic sonobuoy locations are shown by large white circles. Background is satellite gravity data.