Working At The Instituto Geofisico

The Instituto Geofisico

The Instituto Geofisico (Geophysics Institute) is just one department of Quito´s Polytechnic University known as EPN (Escuela Politcnica Nacional). It has the sole responsibiliy throughout Ecuador of monitoring the many active volcanoes in the country, whilst deals with other natural hazard mitigation, for example looking at earthquake activity and other geological phenomena. If there are any issues regarding volcanoes in Ecuador, then the IG are the people to call. It´s a large deaprtment of perhaps 50 - 60 people, most Ecuadorians, but with a scattering of international workers, of whom I would now be a part of.

I have been assingned to the volcano seismology team. That means, we look at the earthquake data coming from volcanoes to understand what the mountains are doing. In Feburary 2010, the Institute is expecting a whole load of instruments to arrive, which they have recently ordered. These monitoring instruments will then be sent around the country to improve our knowledge of the geological and geophysical activity. I will be part of a team for installing these high-tech pieces of equipment, which will be great for learning about volcano monitoring and I´ll also get to see a fair bit of the country too. For now however, I have been made responsible for seismic data processing. essentially looking at the seismic information coming in (in real-time) from several seismographs that the Institute has already monitoring some of the volcanoes. I am using various computer programmes to process the data, which at present involves picking non-seismic events and deleting them from our records, and using a powerful geophysical computer tool - matlab, to calculate displacements of the volcano earthquakes from their velocity. This information is being made into a database (which I am currently constructing) for analysis of earthquake attenutaion around the volcano, which ultimately can tell us a great deal about how the volcano might behave.

The people I work with are fantastic, so friendly and helpful and I can tell from just my first few weeks here that this is going to be a lot of fun and a great experience for me.

I didn´t plan it, but I really have arrived in Quito at the right time. For just one week after I arrived, it was celebration time - for one week before the 6th December, is the biggest parties of the year in this city. I had arrived just in time for the Founding of Quito Festival.................