About

iMARL the “Insitu Marine Laboratory for Geosystems Research” is a network of various types of ocean floor located sensors, hosted by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS). It comprises broadband Ocean Bottom Seismographs (OBS), hydro-acoustic sensors, and sensors for measuring absolute water pressure & temperature at the ocean floor. A system capable of detecting tsunamis also forms part of the infrastructure. The sensor pool is largely mobile and can, in principle, be deployed around the world. One instrument is a long term OBS and will ultimately become a real-time sensing offshore element of the Irish National Seismic Network (www.insn.ie)

Strapped to sea-bed landers and deployed on the sea floor iMARL can detect offshore earthquakes and offshore storms, as well as noise in the ocean and biologically generated acoustic signals (e.g. from cetaceans). Impacts from this equipment include: natural resources quantification, natural hazard estimation, environmental and baseline climate related “insitu” ocean monitoring and the monitoring of marine noise pollution.

Through an award to the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS) the iMARL infrastructure is funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) with support from the Geological Survey Ireland (GSI).