Abstract
The GEOICE project was a collaborative instrumentation development
effort funded by NSF and undertaken by Central Washington University,
New Mexico Tech, and the Incorporated Research Institutions for
Seismology (IRIS). Born out of a desire to facilitate additional seismic
exploration of polar regions, the GEOICE project developed a multi-modal
pool of seismic equipment for deployments in harsh polar environments,
with the signature capability of recording the seismic wavefield with
minimal aliasing. The completed instrumentation set is available as a
community resource which expands on the IRIS PASSCAL Polar instrument
pool. A significant amount of effort was put into testing the new
equipment pool by the staff at the IRIS PASSCAL Instrument Center. Over
the past several years this included both testing at the facility, as
well as field testing of sensors, data loggers, and power systems in
Alaska and Antarctica. The final equipment pool consists of 10 posthole
polar-rated broadbands, 55 compact posthole polar-rated broadbands, 65
next-generation polar-rated dataloggers, and 200 all-in-one nodal-style
high-frequency seismometers. Through a combination of design and
form-factor, this pool will expand on and improve the instrumentation
needed to perform high-quality seismic investigations of Earth’s
ice-covered regions with reduced logistics and power requirements, while
enabling spatially dense observations over a very wide frequency range.
This new instrumentation can be used to study a variety of phenomena in
ice-covered regions, recording signals from the solid Earth, glacier
movement, liquid water flow and other relevant signals. Thus, these
instruments will be a key tool for making observations of the
interaction of the solid Earth with the cryosphere and atmosphere to
better understand how drivers such as climate change impacts these
systems.