Project SEA‑SEIS deployed 18 ocean‑bottom seismometers (OBS) in the Northeast Atlantic

Ocean, bounded by Ireland and Britain to the east and Iceland and the Mid‑Atlantic Ridge to the northwest. The 3‑component, broadband instruments, each with an additional broadband hydrophone, were deployed for 19 months, from September‑October, 2018, to April‑May, 2020. A key goal of the deployment was to advance our understanding of the structure and dynamics of the North Atlantic lithosphere and underlying mantle, origins of the North Atlantic Igneous Province and the morphology of the Iceland Plume.

Farmed landscapes provide a natural laboratory to test how management reshapes near-surface hydrodynamics. Combining distributed acoustic sensing with physics-based hydromechanical modeling, we tracked minute-resolution, meter-scale changes across experimental fields with controlled tillage and compaction histories. We find that dynamic capillary effects, rate-dependent suction stresses during wetting and drying, govern transient stiffness and moisture redistribution in disturbed soils, producing sharp post-rain velocity drops from near-surface saturation and large hysteretic velocity rebounds driven by evapotranspiration. By pairing a seismic rainfall proxy with a drainage closure, we invert velocity changes to estimate evapotranspiration, revealing how disturbance alters flux partitioning and storage.