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.

Geohazards, including earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, and landslides, cause billions of dollars in U.S. economic losses, loss of life, injuries, and significant disruption to lives and livelihoods on an annual basis. The ability of the geoscience community to respond rapidly after a hazardous event or at the signs of precursors to these events, provides critical data to understand the physical processes responsible for these destructive events. The Seismological Facility for the Advancement of Geoscience (SAGE) is an NSF-funded facility operated by the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS). As a part of the SAGE award, IRIS will implement an expanded capability to facilitate rapidly responding to geohazards with geophysical instrumentation. After several years of gathering community input, IRIS is ready to begin procurement of a new suite of instrumentation for rapidly responding to geohazard events. During the past year, staff at the IRIS/PASSCAL Instrument Center have conducted instrument testing and evaluation to inform the preferred mix of instrumentation for the new rapid response equipment pool—which is expected to include broadband and nodal seismometers, digitizers, and infrasound sensors. This effort has been guided by recommendations from a recent Rapid Response Community Whitepaper, with ongoing oversight from the PASSCAL Standing Committee. A copy of the whitepaper, as well as recordings and presentations from hosted gatherings have been posted to IRIS’ Rapid Response to Geohazards webpage (www.iris.edu/rapid). With testing and evaluation complete, IRIS is looking ahead to procuring instruments and associated equipment over the next year, followed by acceptance testing and integration at the IRIS/PASSCAL Instrument Center. Concurrently, IRIS is working with community governance to formalize new policies and procedures that will outline how this new community resource can most effectively and efficiently be used for geohazard-related observations. Beginning in 2023, PIs will be able to schedule and use this equipment from the IRIS/PASSCAL Instrument Center. We look forward to presenting further details on the above-mentioned activities during the AGU Fall Meeting.

Over the past third of a century the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) has facilitated observational seismology in many ways. At the beginning of IRIS in 1984, and with the support of the National Science Foundation and in partnership with the US Geological Survey, IRIS embarked on deploying the Global Seismographic Network (GSN). Key characteristics of the GSN are its use of high-performance digitizers, very broad band seismometers, strong motion accelerometers, and high frequency sensors to provide multi-decadal observations across a wide frequency band and dynamic range. The IRIS Portable Array Seismic Studies of the Continental Lithosphere (PASSCAL) program has also operated since 1984. PASSCAL’s extensive inventory of seismic equipment has been used by scientists to make observations on every part of the globe. The number and breadth of observations made with this equipment has fueled thousands of research papers and contributed to the education of hundreds, if not thousands, of students. More recently, the IRIS-operated EarthScope Transportable Array (TA) provided a breakthrough in the systematic collection of data using an array of unprecedented size. The success of the TA has ushered in a new era of “Large N” seismology, focused on dense spatial coverage of sensors to reduce aliasing and provide more complete recording of the full wavefield. The TA highlighted the power of survey mode data collection, where systematic, spatially-dense, and high-quality data fuel data-driven discovery, as opposed to deployments made to test a specific hypothesis. Key future directions in observational seismology include an increasing emphasis on wavefield measurements. Deploying instruments in large numbers requires reductions in the size, weight, and power of units, as well as a focus on dirt-to-desktop data management strategies that merge data and metadata while minimizing human intervention with the data flow from the sensor in the dirt to the scientist’s desktop. Other critical frontiers include pervasive seafloor observations to enable studies of key structures like subduction zones, more accessible satellite telemetry to enable ubiquitous sensing of the environment, and new sensing technologies such as MEMS and Distributed Acoustic Sensing.