Tech Selected for Major Seismic Research Lab

SOCORRO, NM, Jan. 26, 1998 -- The New Mexico Tech campus in Socorro has been selected as the new location for a national seismological instrument center.

A nationwide search committee composed of earth scientists and the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) Executive Committee gave final approval on Friday, Jan. 23, to New Mexico Tech to become permanent host to the facility, reports project principal investigator Rick Aster.

IRIS is a National Science Foundation (NSF) research consortium composed of over 100 university and other institutional members, which is tasked with exploring the Earth's interior through the collection and distribution of seismographic data. The consortium's activities emphasize research, education, earthquake hazard mitigation, and the verification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The IRIS website is at www.iris.edu.

New Mexico Tech's plan was chosen over five other proposals submitted by academic institutions from throughout the nation.

The planned facility on the university's campus will consolidate IRIS's support for seismological instrumentation by replacing two current facilities, one at Stanford University in California and one at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in New York.

New Mexico Tech will build a custom-designed, 9000-square-foot building and warehouse for IRIS in the research park area of its campus to host the facility, which will have an annual budget of more than $1.2 million, and which will support 12 full-time and several part-time employees.

Aster, who also is a geophysics professor and research geophysicist at Tech's Geophysical Research Center, noted, "The research center also will provide significant new educational and employment opportunities for Tech undergraduate and graduate students in Earth science, engineering, computer science, and other programs."

The Center will be a principal national facility for supporting the collection, processing, and study of earthquake and other seismic data through its role as a "seismograph lending library" and instrumentation training facility for scientists with grants from the NSF and other agencies.

Facility staff will provide logistical and technical support to field experiments taking place on every continent.

The Instrument Center also will be an important facility for research into and development of new seismological instrumentation and associated computer software.

The unique attributes of New Mexico Tech, as well as the Socorro area, were essential components of the initiative's success, Aster pointed out.

In its proposal, the state-supported university cited several benefits of locating the new research center on its campus, including: world-class expertise in Earth science and scientific instrumentation; a talented and technically literate student body; a long history of hosting comparable NSF and other scientific facilities (such as the world-renowned Very Large Array radio telescope's Array Operations Center); strong support from the Socorro community and its local and national elected officials; and vigorous support from the New Mexico Tech administration and the university's Board of Regents.