Hi all, I'm at Istanbul airport on my way to Trieste Italy. I just got off the Piri Reis, a research ship from a university in Izmir, Turkey. I lived on the ship for 3 weeks. We were at sea for 2 weeks. We imaged the sub-bottom of Marmara Sea using the seismic reflection technique...at high resolutions. This was to imaged various strands of the North Anatolia fault...which is like the San Andreas and which threaten Istanbul. We imaged all kinds of cool stuff...gas leaking out of the main fault, gas on anticlines, the faults, and a stack of deltas formed during glacial periods and preserved on a subsiding basin. These are formed near low-stand sea level and are markers of verticsl motion.

There were quite a few Turkish students on board...they did very valuable work on data acquisition and processing. They all seemed top-notch. The majority were women. We called them "photogenic", since old farts such as ourselves can not say more than that (in joke for cruise).

More posts coming...you can comment on what you want to hear about. I had access to an internet cafe once in the middle of the cruise and it was lo-speed and the keyboard had Turkish characters.

Our cruise was on National Turkish news last night, and a bunch of reporters were getting on the ship as I was getting off. ...so will be coverage tonight.

It's a big deal here: 2000 people were killed in 1999 in the western part of Istanbul, where I am sitting now, from the distant Izmit quake. We imaged the fault near and west of here. If it dips north it is bad news for Istanbul. If it dips south, is better. There are a LOT of active faults in Marmara Sea

Ciao
Chris