The RV Tangaroa is assisting in New Zealand’s largest ever deployment of seafloor earthquake recording instruments in a bid to learn more about the earthquake behaviour of the tectonic plates beneath the east coast of the North Island.
NIWA research ship RV Tangaroa has been chartered by GNS Science to recover Ocean Bottom Seismometers (OBS) placed on the seafloor of the Hikurangi subduction zone in previous voyages. The work is coordinated with the US academic seismic research vessel RV Marcus Langseth and the US International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) academic drilling vessel RV Joides Resolution.
More information: Multinational probe of Hikurangi subduction zone gets underway
The course taken by RV Tangaroa is shown in the map below.