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Immediate Report of Victoria University Of Wellington Antarctic Expedition 1987-88: VUWAE 32

19 November to 7 January 1988: Recording and Analysis of Data at Scott Base

19 November to 7 January 1988: Recording and Analysis of Data at Scott Base

It was the task of Susan Ellis, the longest staying member of the team, to videotape the Erebus TV as many hours a day as possible, and to fast scan each tape, and re-use those with no useful data. The San-ei visual writing seismic recorder was used to help find eruptions on TV. Susan copied each obvious eruption onto an edited videotape, and at the end of her stay, photographed the TV monitor display of the edited videotape with an NTSC camera and recorder provided by NIPR, to get an NTSC copy for Japan and USA. The original recordings were also kept.

The Erebus seismic network was being recorded as part of the normal work of Scott Base, and as each tape was taken off the Sony Data Recorder, Susan replayed it on a second machine at 100x recording speed into a log amplifier and 4 pen chart recorder to get short index charts of time scale 4 mm per hour of the entire 8 day record. Photocopies of these charts of log seismic amplitude will be sent to Drs Kyle, Kienle, and Kaminuma so that they can choose earthquakes for further analysis, or look at statistics of occurrence. (Normally, staff play tapes back at Scott Base × 10 faster, and record the entire waveforms).

For the well recorded explosion earthquakes, and other earthquakes, Susan made normal seismograms of all useful data channels by playing the tapes at recording speed and the chart recorder at 1 mm/s and 10 mm/s. Initially, there were only 6 channels (limited by discriminators) but after Prof. John Schlue of New Mexico Institute of Mining and Metallurgy had carried out some tests with long period seismometers at Abbotts Peak, he brought back the rack of discriminators which NSF had removed from Scott Base on 7 January 1987, and 8 channels were then recorded.

Susan's final task, before she returned to New Zealand on 8 January was to replace the Sony Data Recorder which had been recording Erebus data for 2 years, with the one used for playback, and to pack up the playback equipment for return to NZ and Japan.