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Earthquake Observations From Moored Vertical Hydrophone Array in Arctic Ocean

Description: 

Six hydrophone moorings were deployed in the Arctic Ocean during the 2019-2020 Coordinated Arctic Acoustic Thermometry Experiment (CAATEX) to study ocean water temperature variations throughout the year by using sound-speed profiles inferred from the arrival times of signals from known active sources. The six moorings were grouped into two sets of three: one north of Canada and one north of Svalbard, Norway, forming a line across the North Pole. Each mooring was equipped with a distributed vertical line array (DVLA), containing 25-40 hydrophones on a vertical cable with a 30-40 m spacing, measuring the hydroacoustic pressure from depths of 50-1200 m. One of the three moorings in each group had a transducer positioned directly above the DVLA, which transmitted an 875-s-long signal, centered at 35 Hz, every 3 days. The hydrophones recorded twice a day for a total of 90 minutes (from 11:59:50 or 23:59:50 UTC to 12:45:00 or 00:45:00 UTC) with a sampling rate of 976.5625 Hz. Over a year of deployment, these moorings passively listened to sounds in the ocean, including earthquakes, in addition to the active sources. This deployment allowed us to observe seismic activities in the Arctic Ocean from their signals in the water column. We present a catalog of earthquakes recorded by these moored vertical hydrophone arrays, together with incident angles inferred from the acoustic wave propagation speed along the cable from both P waves and oceanic T phases. These observations are useful for studying the seismic activity as well as the physical structure of the ocean and the solid Earth along the source-receiver paths. We explore using earthquake signals to infer the sound speed profile and model the effects of ocean bathymetry and possible sound speed changes on the acoustic waves generated by these earthquakes. We hope that our findings will contribute to the understanding of the acoustic environment of the Arctic Ocean and show the possibility of using ocean acoustic observations to study the Earth.

Session: New Frontiers in Seismic Observations and Modeling with Innovative Methods and Emerging Data on Earth and Other Planets - I

Type: Oral

Date: 4/17/2026

Presentation Time: 11:00 AM (local time)

Presenting Author: Sirawich Pipatprathanporn

Student Presenter: No

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