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Introduction
About 70 % of the world is covered by oceans. Because of the difficulty of accessing the ocean floor, most of the seafloor and the crust below was unexplored for a long time. In the early 1930s, the seismic refraction method was developed and geoscientists tried to develop techniques to use this method offshore. They experimented with cabled sources and geophones but also with free-fall instruments. The first layout of a stand-alone ocean-bottom seismometer (OBS) was published in 1938 (Ewing and Vine 1938) and tested in the years 1939–1940. This OBS used a gasoline-filled rubber balloon for buoyancy, which floats approx. 3 m above the seafloor. An aluminum housing containing an automatic oscillograph was mounted below the balloon. The iron ballast and the external geophone for recording man-made explosive seismic signals were located on the ocean bottom (Ewing et al. 1946).
After these first experiments, there were only intermittent OBS deployments until the...
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References
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Schmidt-Aursch, M.C., Crawford, W.C. (2014). Ocean-Bottom Seismometer. In: Beer, M., Kougioumtzoglou, I., Patelli, E., Au, IK. (eds) Encyclopedia of Earthquake Engineering. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36197-5_173-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36197-5_173-1
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