continuing on...John Diebold has been preparing files from the ship's chirp seismic and the minichirp for me to load into the interpretation software, and I load them. One of the 2 zodiac surveys was in the Bay de Petit Goave (you can google earth it and see the fault headed that way, or if you have more time and bandwidth on your hands, the new Lidar is probably available). The surface rupture (if it is that) projects into the Bay.

Sean, Hal, Matt said the scene in the Bay was sad with pancaked houses, and trees that had dropped straight down so they were submerged. There were landslides of the soft sediments on the bay floor. I multitask really poorly but managed to keep an eye on the chirp seismic recorder and also interpret the minichirp. I interpreted some sub-bottom reflections and the north side of where I could interpret these was a WNW-ESE line that is a fault strand that aligns with the onshore break in the west and with a mapped fault in the east. On one of the profiles there seems to be a sea floor offset of some tens of cm (have to find this again and measure it); on the others you can not tell whether or not there is a small vertical offset.

I'm still not 100% clear in why it is so important whether there is a surface rupture in this quake, but they do need to locate the active strand in this area so that they can trench it for previous quakes.

Chris