ALBERT

Description: The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC) has coupled improving the speed of its 24/7 response with the need to update its system to adapt to continuously evolving technologies. The NEIC is implementing a new analyst interface and corresponding workflow, called “Quick-Look”, for analysts to do a cursory evaluation of rapid automatic seismic solutions to determine to release automatic data to responders, agencies, scientific communities, and the general public. The Quick-Look capability creates the opportunity to distribute validated automatic seismic solutions considerably faster than solutions currently released via the NEIC human-reviewed workflow and policy. We describe this new interface, which utilizes web services and web displays, quantify data release speed increases, and describe the integration with the legacy monitoring and analysis system.With a small team the NEIC must balance maintaining the existing operational, global, seismic detection, and monitoring software system, addressing issues across data, infrastructure, security, and workflow, while concurrently designing and building a new system with updated infrastructure, technologies, algorithms, and approaches. We describe how the team manages this leveraging shared technologies and approaches across USGS public and internal applications, which includes containers, continuous integration continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, data messaging and web services, and web-based user interfaces. Using a containerized environment coupled with data messaging and web services, the architecture can exploit standardized approaches across multiple applications to support more rapid, secure, and automated deployments, in hybrid and/or cloud friendly, essentially location agnostic, environments.

Description: In 2018, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) hosted an international workshop titled “Future Opportunities in Regional and Global Seismic Network Monitoring and Science”, in which members identified and prioritized areas of research to improve global seismic monitoring. This meeting directly informed the USGS National Earthquake Information Center’s (NEIC) 5-year strategic plan. The international, real-time, sharing of parametric earthquake data was identified as a critical area of development that could improve monitoring. The need for rapid parametric data sharing became even more apparent following the COVID-19 pandemic, as many monitoring operations were strained. As all monitoring agencies have similar missions, to rapidly report on earthquakes and their effects in efforts to mitigate impacts, the community can greatly benefit by mutually supporting each other through automatic information sharing. In 2022, the NEIC hosted a follow-up workshop supported by the USGS Powell Center. The workshop prioritized updates following the COVID-19 pandemic and addressed the specific task of international parametric data sharing. We discussed how to rapidly communicate operational information between our agencies (e.g., system outages), the types of automatic derived earthquake data we should be sharing, and infrastructure requirements. The working group decided to explore automatically sharing picks and moment tensors, leveraging easily deployable messaging software such as Apache Kafka. We identified other areas where further discussion could benefit our agencies, such as our standard operating procedures (SOPs) for source characterization. Here we will share the outcome of these meetings and discuss how they fit into NEIC’s strategic plan priorities.

Description: The magnetic properties of 56 samples of basalt from DSDP Leg 82 were studied in order to examine regional variations as well as the general question of the origin or remanence. Magnetization was carried, for the most part, by typical low temperature oxidized titanomagnetites, although two samples did show anomalous thermomagnetic curves. The natural remanence is distinctly different from an anhysteretic remanent magnetization and is hypothesized (by inference) to also be different from a thermoremanent magnetization (TRM) also. This suggests that alteration not only reduces the initial TRM but also changes it to chemical remanent magnetization with a significantly different magnetic character. An examination of thermomagnetic data tentatively suggests that the ulvospinel content of the titanomagnetites may be more variable than is commonly assumed. With the exception of a slight increase in saturation magnetization with decreasing latitude, no significant regional variations were evident.

Description: Ten samples of gabbro and peridotite, with varying degrees of serpentinization, were studied by magnetic techniques and reflected light microscopy. Evidence from these methods suggests that the natural remanent magnetization is primarily of chemical origin. It is generally weak for the gabbros and much stronger for the peridotites. This difference is offset by the fact that the peridotites have generally lower magnetic stability and Koenigsberger ratios. There is a considerable variation in both magnetic parameters and petrology even among closely spaced samples, which suggests that some combination of source heterogeneity and tectonic mixing was involved in the production of these rocks. However, the small number of samples makes this conclusion tentative. There may also have been significant postemplacement alteration involved. All samples show a significant anisotropy of weak field susceptibility that appears to be related to deformation. This anisotropy may be useful in defining petrofabrics.