The oceans cover about 71% of the Earth's surface. Yet, our understanding of the oceanic crust and mantle primarily relies on seismic data from continents or islands. Ocean-bottom seismometers (OBS) are powerful tools for revealing the intricate details of the Earth's sub-oceanic interior, but large-scale OBS deployments remain challenging due to technical, logistical, and financial hurdles.
Over the past two decades, various OBS arrays and other passive ocean-bottom geophysical instruments, such as geodetic and magnetotelluric sensors, have been deployed globally. This led to fascinating new discoveries worldwide, from exciting earthquake phenomena (e.g., slow slip events) to new constraints on subduction processes, mantle plumes, ridges, transform faults, thermal heterogeneity and volatile cycling. However, despite technological advances and improved data processing techniques, significant challenges persist. For example, the sharing and application of best practices for OBS deployments, data preprocessing and formatting is still limited. Many processed data sets are not released for years (if at all), limiting the long-term impact and sustainability of data from these expensive, often publicly-funded projects.
We invite contributions from the global ocean-bottom geophysics community to share their knowledge, experiences and scientific findings. We welcome contributions on all aspects from instrumentation development, experiment design, data processing and analysis (e.g., software, machine learning tools), to new scientific results (e.g., tomography, receiver functions, ambient noise studies, earthquake source analysis, active source imaging, etc). We encourage contributions in all relevant areas, such as from seafloor environmental sensors (e.g., using submarine fibre cables), magnetotellurics, geodesy, ocean acoustics, oceanography and marine biology.