Story Photos
 Photo by Bill Wagner Jeremy Plummer of Tacoma Pump and Drilling prepares a metal casing to be inserted into a 700-foot deep hole his crew is drilling this month on Cathlamet resident Patrick Dennis's property as part of a $250 million National Science Foundation project. |
Drilling for discovery
Friday, December 16, 2005 10:35 PM PST
By Amy M. E. Fischer
Printable version
E-mail this articleCathlamet resident Patrick Dennis's back yard became part of a $250 million science project this month.
For the last two weeks, drilling crews have been boring a hole 750 feet deep on Dennis's property in the 1400 block of Elochoman Valley Road. Next spring, a strain meter, a borehole seismometer and a surface Global Positioning Station will be installed, transmitting data by satellite to a laboratory in Boulder, Colo.
The retired St. John Medical Center maintenance worker's yard is one of roughly 100 sites along the West Coast between British Columbia and the Mexican border that will record earth movements and could one day predict earthquakes and volcanic activity, according to the National Science Foundation, to which Congress granted funding for the EarthScope project in 2003.
When the equipment installation at all sites is finished in 2008, the public will be able to access the data online. Scientists hail EarthScope as the most ambitious geosciences endeavor in the exploration of the West since the Lewis and Clark expedition, said strainmeter field engineer Tim Dittman.
"Within the field of geosciences, there's really nothing done like this before," Dittman said Friday. "The combination of these three kinds of instruments on such a huge, broad scale is unparalleled in the world of geology."
Dittman and fellow strainmeter engineer Sarah Benator have been charged by their higher-ups at the National Science Foundation with finding geologically suitable sites along the Pacific plate boundary in which to install the scientific instruments. Engineers look for areas with hard, unfractured rock, preferably basalt, on sites spaced out 50 kilometers along the coast, Dittman said.
They also knock on doors, asking landowners for permission to install equipment on their property -- a process that generates mixed reactions.
"You name it, we get just about everything," Dittman said. "Most of the time the negative reception is from people who don't know what we're doing, and they're not interested in having people snoop around on their property."
Patrick Dennis, whose wife teaches math and science at Wahkiakum High School, has been "nothing but supportive," Dittman noted approvingly.
The West Coast is of particular interest to scientists because it's in a subduction region, which means one of the earth's plates is being pushed beneath another. In this case, the Pacific plate is being shoved beneath the North American plate, and scientists wish to study the compression region near the plate boundary, said Dittman, who recently graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor's degree in geological engineering.
The strain meters, which are inserted between 400 and 750 feet deep, record the increase in compression over time. When the pressure builds up until the rock can't bear any more strain, an earthquake occurs, which the seismometer will record, Dittman said. The earthquake shifts the rock along the region, and, over time, the GPS monitor will show the surface deformation, he said.
The data recorded by instruments at all 100 sites along the West Coast will give scientists a broad-scale sense of the motion and mechanics of the plate movement, plus the magnitude and recurrence intervals of earthquakes, he said. The goal is to keep the equipment operational for at least 15 years.
For more information about the EarthScope project, go to www.earthscope.org.
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