Guralp Systems Ltd. will deliver another turn-key, cabled Ocean Bottom Seismometer system (OBS). We have just been awarded a contract with a major electric utility company in the United States to deploy several OBS systems off the West Coast of the United States. The goal of this cabled network is to monitor in real-time tectonic faults under the seabed. The contract calls for a turn-key system, with GSL manufacturing and deploying the OBS sensors (CMG-3ESP, CMG-5T and DM-24), laying and connecting the under-sea cable as well as providing on-shore equipment for data acquisition and storage.
This contract follows on the heels of another turn-key OBS project, which we completed in December 2010 in Turkey. For this project, we installed a network of 5 OBS in the Sea of Marmara and laid more than 50 km of under sea cables. These stations close a major void in the coverage of the Turkish national seismic network and help monitor a dangerous seismic gap along the North Anatolian Fault southwest of Istanbul, Turkey’s biggest city.
We at GSL are proud to have been awarded this latest contract. It again shows that Guralp Systems is the world leader in providing seismic measuring equipment for ocean bottom applications. Over the last 20 years, GSL has sold more than 250 OBS for various projects in virtually all different ocean basins. These projects include several world premieres, i.e. the first broadband seismometer on the ocean bottom, the first ever Ocean Bottom Borehole Seismometer and the first OBS connected to an undersea cable for real-time data transmission.
One reason for this success is that the OBS group in our company has followed a mixed approach, by
