Last week we completed the first magnetotelluric fieldwork for the DIG project. Several of us travelled to Munster Basin, Co. Cork, a known area of high heat flow and the location of the Mallow warm springs.
Our base station was near the beautiful location of Gougane Barra. A remote area with less anthropogenic noise than our main profile.
After establishing a base, we deployed a mix of long and short period instruments along a 5 km long profile. This profile is a short test profile to give us an overview of the lithospheric structure in this location and plan a denser and more targeted deployment in the future.
The mian profile is noisier than the base station with noise from electric fences and water pumps but this can be removed in future processing steps when we clean up the data.
Members of the team also deployed seismic nodal instruments. These are again a pilot study to understand the directionality of seismic noise sources in the area. These will again be scaled to a targeted study of the Munster basin.
This stage of fieldwork took ~ 2 weeks and we expect the next stage of data collection to occur in the first half of 2022.
Photos courtesy of Colin Hogg and Emma Chambers
