Through the Ocean to the Mantle: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas with a Fleet of Floating Seismic Robots

n the last few decades, seismologists have mapped the Earth's interior
(crust, mantle, and core) in ever increasing detail. Natural
earthquakes, the sources of energy used to probe the Earth's inside via
seismic computerized tomography, occur mostly on tectonic plate
boundaries. Seismometers, the receivers of earthquake wave motion, are
located mostly on dry land. Such fundamentally inadequate
'source-receiver' coverage leaves large volumes inside the Earth
entirely unexplored. Here be dragons! Placing seismic stations on the
ocean bottom is among the solutions practiced successfully today. But
there are exciting alternatives. Enter MERMAID: a fully autonomous
marine instrument that travels deep below the ocean surface, recording
global seismic activity - and marine environmental data - and reporting
it by surfacing for satellite data transmission. This presentation will
discuss a century of Earth imaging, a decade of instrument design and
development, and a day in the life of exploring the challenging - and
wet - places that our scientific journey has taken us.