I found myself working for a seismic exploration team in the early 1990's. They had hired me to back up their data from paper, 8-track tape, 9mm dat, floppy disks and everything else on CD-ROM. It was a good gig, and they liked my work, so they made me permanent.
During the winter, I worked went to school and worked with their computer engineer on various small projects. Not the least of which was organizing the data I had backed up the summer before. Somehow, names like trip 1 or spot by fence were not meaningful enough for the team. It paid my bills, and I liked the people, but when we went out to the field, it took me away for weeks at a time.
This was not exactly healthy for my social life, and was part of the reason that things eventually went sour with my girl friend of the time. In anycase, this story is not about her, or about the survey. It is about faultlines and underground mountains.
The survey was hired by various organizations, government agencies, and private individuals to make underground maps. They did this in a manner analogous to sonar. Well, thats not exactly right, but it is close.
The survey would lay out a line of cable that 'geophones' every forty feet or so. These geophones were basically microphones and would listen to the vibrations or the sounds of the ground under them. They were like bits on this screen. They gave part of the picture of the ground under them. The survey would then thump ground with some sort of noise maker and record what the geophones received.
Ok enough boring stuff. They put a condom on the end of a 50 cal rifle and shot the ground and listened to the echoes. enuff said. They also had a vibrator, which was a big vehicle designed to shake the ground, for the same purpose. It had a female operator who received no end of comments, but she gave as well as she got.
Anyway, that is what the survey did. They made maps. People paid them to: look and see if companies were contaminating underground water reserviors, to look for oil and other mineral deposits, to measure fault lines, to look for underground caves, and to develop the technology for things like detecting mines in a mine field. It was neat stuff.
We talked about getting shirts that said we walked the Kansas mountains, but never did on my watch.
The field trips were exhausting. You moved cable and planted geophones all day. We had ATV's which were designed to help us in this task, but since science is never fully funded these machines were custom built in the shop and only half safe.
On one expedition, we drove for a day, and then stopped for the night before getting up at dawn. We then got up at dawn drove to the site, got out, started planting geophones in the rain, waited for the rain to stop (a real problem for geological sound based map making) and when everything was calm discovered that the seismograph was busted.
We packed up, drove back (it was cheaper), fixed the seismograph the next day, drove back to the site, planted the geophones again and discovered,
they were still dead.
So yes, we did it all again. On the third trip, something else broke. Our fearless leader took the keyboard in front of him and chucked it accross a farmer's field hitting and startling some nearby hogs. His face was that of a mad man. We packed up and drove the whole way back without saying a word.
It was one of those eerie moments.
We finally got everything working and started testing. It was like a 100. We were all napping when we could and were on the edge of exhaustion.
I was one of the first to fall.
During the day I helped the crew. At night, I backed up the data from the seismograph hard drives. I had to empty them to make them available for the next day. At dawn, it started all over again.
About the third week, I was on one of those modified ATV's and was going a little faster than I should have been. My mission at the moment was to pick up the flags that were used to mark where the cable and geophones were. We had just completed a line, and were moving on to the next site.
Anyway, I was humming along when I saw in my rear view mirror, a bundle of flags. I stopped, threw it into reverse, and zoomed back to pick them up. I turned the wheel as I went, and yes flipped. Big Time.
I remember thinking that the ground was a long way away, as I was thrown about fifteen feet. I went into a roll when I hit (which amazed me because my martial arts training was long before) and came up sort of confused and stunned. I remember looking at the bent remains of the ATV. I remember saying on my walkie talkie. The good news is "I'm alright. The bad news is the ATV isnt."
I had to go get stitches for the little piece of muscle that stuck out of my palm. That hurt worse than anything. I then wanted to go back to work. They wouldnt let me. I was confined to the hotel room for three days.
On their web page, someone took a picture of the ATV. The caption read: We're like the mail service. Nothing stops us. He walked away and came back for more.
