Spider Unit & 2014 Washington Landslide

The photograph shows a spider unit, which is being used to help study the landslide that occurred in northwest Washington on March 22, 2014. Spiders are portable instrumentation packages that contain high-precision GPS units for detecting landslide movement as well as geophones for detecting small vibrations. The spiders can be emplaced by hovering helicopters. Data from the spider units are transmitted by radio to USGS computers and made available to the monitoring team.