Stephen Malone, an emeritus professor at the University of Washington and the former director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, worked from 2005 to 2014 to laboriously recover the data from the tapes into a digital form. The quality of the data is less impressive than today’s digital recordings, he noted, but combined with modern software and techniques, they could give researchers new insights into volcanic systems, and potentially into the May 1980 eruption. Techniques borrowed from the audio recording industry helped Malone figure out how to restore and stabilize some of the tapes. “If you bake the tapes, actually cook them at low temperatures for a day, it sets the binder oxide on the tape such that it won’t be scraped off as easily," he said. He and his wife experimented with this technique using a home oven, “and we were able to recover data with pretty good fidelity." |
