MCS Transects of the Gorda Rise and Costa Rica Rift: Two ONR-Funded Surveys aboard R/V Ewing

The consensus reached at the ONR Workshop on Investigations of Young Oceanic Crust, held at Friday Harbor, Washington in March of 1993, was that marine geophysical surveys should be conducted in one or more 'corridors' in the Eastern Pacific. It was recognized that multichannel seismic MCS reflection profiling was an important part of such surveys, despite their relatively high cost. Excellent results were gained during two such profiling efforts, which were carried out as 'add-on' surveys, attached in one case to a larger, NSF-funded survey, and in the other, carried out during a transit leg. In both cases, transit, mobilization and demobilization costs were minimal, and the maximum amount of data possible was obtained, given the available funding.