Hi All, I overslept the start of my midnight to 4 AM watch, which you are not supposed to do, but we are not yet collecting much data, so HW, who is on the same watch, did not wake me up. Yesterday afternoon we came into the Bay of Port-au-Prince and it was impressive. The mountains are very steep into the water (and under the water the sea floor is very steep also), except at the east end of the Bay, where downtown Port au Prince lies, it is very low and flat. It reminded me of Lake Tanganyika north of Bujumbura. I was struck by the smoke. It was issuing from all sorts of places along the steep slopes west and south of downtown. I guessed that some of this was cooking fires and that it may have been like this before, but guessed that they were also burning debris. One of the scientists said it looked just like Kingston Jamaica, which is along the same fault system. The bay was impressively filled with military ships including an aircraft carrier and the hospital ship “Comfort”. We unloaded a container of large tents for schools that was put on board by a charity.

The 3 Haitian observers came aboard. One is an engineer and geologist (Nicole) and the others are civil engineers. HW and I were able to speak French with them (they speak at least some English also). I showed Nicole some of the data I have loaded into the interpretation system, which includes the Western Geophysical deep seismic reflection data that the USGS and Western Geco have put online, and that I posted some of on Earthwaves a month ago (I will have to move the graphics files to a permanent directory because they have long since been removed automatically from our UCSB FTP site).

OK, some geology on next post.
Chris