Simon Stähler, Kasra Hosseini, and I joined colleagues from Kiel and Bremerhaven on a geophysical research cruise to Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic, self-proclaimed "remotest island in the world". Our objective was to prepare for our own cruise around La Réunion, and to familiarize ourselves with the ocean-bottom seismometers that can be borrowed from the German community instrument pool. Besides assembling and deploying seismometers, I got the job of writing the expedition blog for the website of GEOMAR Kiel, pdf here. (The language is a bit mixed, because GEOMAR translated some of the pieces back to German.)

We installed seismic stations on five small, uninhabited islands in the western Indian Ocean, together with colleagues from the University of La Reunion and from IPG Paris. The work was done during a month-long ship cruise, and the journalist who wrote this "diary" came along. The cruise enabled the biological and geophysical study of the Iles Eparses: tiny, uninhabited coral atolls surrounding Madagascar, which had been declared natural preserves some decades ago, and usually cannot be accessed. It was the first stage of what we hope to develop into a larger project, aimed at illuminating the mantle's structure beneath the Reunion hotspot, a prime candidate for a deep-seated mantle plume. We also want to investigate swells (long ocean waves generated by distant storms) using seismic records, since oceanographic instrumentation in the region is also very sparse. (Original version online here, pdf here. )

This annotated picture gallery in the U.S. science magazine Discover featured my 3D tomographic image of the Farallon plate that subducts under North America. More generally, the article showcased examples of how geoscientists illuminate the earth's hidden interior, using high-performance computing and modern visualization techniques. (Their complete gallery can be browsed online here.)

11 March 2011. The day of the devastating Japanese earthquake and tsunami, the Spanish language section of Deutsche Welle produced this interview about dangers to the west coast of South America and the islands of the Pacific Ocean. (Original version online here.)

A nicely written and photographed account of the people and logistics behind USArray, the largest-ever geophysical experiment. Happy to report that they chose our 2008 mantle model for the only graphic that explains the experiment's scientific results (p.87, "Untergrundbewegung").

This article highlighted our Sigloch et al. 2008 tomographic model as an example of the scientific harvest gathered from the larger USArray experiment (graphics on page 29).