VISIONS05

This program has resulted in the first installation of a seismic array utilizing buried broadband seismometers. The first year of this experiment documented over 12,000 earthquakes! The ultimate experiments to study such systems require an infrastructure like the planned cabled regional observatory called NEPTUNE (http://www.neptune.washington.edu/). The cruise is exploring the early stages of defining a proto-NEPTUNE approach to documenting, sampling, and modeling many of the processes that are so difficult to examine with either a ship or a satellite. We have been running experiments on the Endeavour Ridge for the last 4 years to identify the approaches and instrumentation scenarios that will work when NEPTUNE capabilities are available. On the VISIONS05 cruise, we are recovering and redeploying an array of in situ instruments to monitor the physical, chemical, and biological characteristics of vent fluids and a network of sophisticated seismometers that allow detection of both small..