NSF Division Director Visits IRIS/PASSCAL

SOCORRO, N.M., January 28, 2002 -- "THE GRAND TOUR . . ." National Science Foundation (NSF) Division Director Herman Zimmerman recently was given a tour of the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) Consortium's Program for Array Seismic Studies of the Continental Lithosphere (PASSCAL) Instrument Center, which is located on the New Mexico Tech campus in Socorro. The tour of the NSF-funded research facility included a short walk outside the building to look at one of IRIS/PASSCAL's newly installed state-of-the-art seismic monitoring stations. Pictured (from left to right) examining the seismic station are Zimmerman, NSF division director of Earth sciences; Rick Aster, professor of geophysics at New Mexico Tech and principal investigator for IRIS/PASSCAL; Jim Fowler, program manager of IRIS/PASSCAL; and Marcos Alvarez, director of IRIS/PASSCAL. The IRIS/PASSCAL Instrument Center is tasked with developing hardware and software associated with earthquake and other geophysical research, providing logistical support for seismic experiments, and maintaining a pool of more than 1,000 portable seismographs that are routinely employed in field research conducted throughout the world by NSF staff, geophysicists, and other scientists.