Sean-Thomas Morrissey

Abstract

### Good science comes from good data. — STM Sean-Thomas Morrissey, an innovative and dedicated instrumentalist, died on March 6th at the age of 59. He was a remarkable individual who worked tirelessly, despite recurring health problems, to find new ways to improve the quality of both seismological and geodetic data. Sean brought a dedication, a perseverance, and a commitment to seismology, to long-term data acquisition, and to instrumentation that helped our science evolve from its beginnings with analog on-site photo recordings to modern digital data acquisition and transmission. ![][1] Sean Morrissey (without hat) working on the installation of the Cathedral Cave, Missouri (CCM) IRIS/GSN station. Sean was educated in the Jesuit tradition, graduating from St. Mark's Academy in Denver and attending Saint Louis University (SLU), where he obtained a B.A. in philosophy in 1964, with majors in mathematics, literature, and education, and pursued a M.S. degree in physics. Only Sean would consider rebuilding the department's cyclotron from scratch as a suitable Master's thesis project. Unfortunately, he had to discontinue this project due to health problems that developed from Addison's disease, a debilitating illness that often requires constant hospitalization of its victims. Typically, Sean let few people know about the disease and continued to conduct difficult and arduous fieldwork, whether it was riding ore carts at unreasonable speeds to service instruments in a dimly lit lead mine, climbing 300-foot cable TV towers to fix errant telemetry receivers, or braving Aleutian gales in an open inflatable Navy Zodiac to land … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif