July 7, 2016
Deep inside Great Mountain Forest, in the northwest corner of the state, Yale geophysicist Maureen Long kneels down in a grassy clearing to see how her seismology station fared over the long winter.
The station is about the size of a sawhorse. It is topped with two small solar panels, but its main feature — a bowling ball-shaped seismometer — is buried a few feet underground. For months, this gear has been collecting information that will help scientists understand the submerged stories of how North America came to be.
“Connecticut is a place where we can see the result of so many different, fundamental Earth processes,” Long explains. “What we don’t know, quite often, is what those processes looked like deep in the Earth.”