See you again soon Qunshu Tang

Today Qunshu Tang has left Durham and returned to China. Tang's one year visit to Durham to study seismic oceanography was sponsored by the China Scholarship Council. During his stay we developed a Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm to model the temperature and salinity of the ocean given a seismic reflection image (2 papers submitted). He also had the opportunity to join the OSCAR cruise (JC114) and has processed the seismic images of the water structure in the Panama Basin. He plans to continue this work on his return to the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology in Guangzhou and integrate his results with other data from the OSCAR cruises. Bon voyage!

InterRidge Theoretical Institute in Hangzhou, China

Representatives from the OSCAR project attended the Third InterRidge Theoretical Institute in Hangzhou, China last week. There were many enthusiastic speakers covering a diverse range of topics from hydrothermal circulation and melt plumbing to complex ridge-transform evolution.

Richard outlined our ultimate goal of better understanding the heat and mass flux between the solid Earth and the abyssal ocean. Preliminary results on crustal structure from the Costa Rica Rift to borehole 504B (Dean), crustal anisotopy at borehole 504B (Emma) and tectonic and magmatic features near the ridge axis (Gavin) were also presented on posters. Congratulations to Emma for winning one of the three student prizes for an outstanding poster.