A real time seafloor seismometer

In this paper we present a new compact design of marine seismometer in the frame of INTMARSIS project.The design pretends to be an alternative to OBS (Ocean Bottom Seismometers) in shallow waters (depth < 500m) to be deployed near de coast.In contrast to OBS, a physical connection between the seafloor unit and the surface buoy allows real time data processing, satellite communication and intranet publishing.Even though an umbilical cable seems to be the more obvious alternative, the low energetic consumption of the seafloor unit and the recent improvements in induc-tive communications open a very interesting new possibility, the connection with steel cables.Steel cables are cheaper and not so heavy as the umbilical ones, and the bandwidth inductive communications supports at least 3 channels 100Hz sampling in real time.Mechanical structure and deployment procedure are also discussed.