Chave of the Woods Hole (Mass.) Oceanographic Institution and his shipboard colleagues enlisted the help of an underwater robot to splice a giant eight-plug adapter into the twisted coil of telephone wire that once linked Hawaii and California.
"They just hardwired seismometers into a cable," Chave says.
"The more pinholes you have, the better you can piece together the whole picture," Chave says.
Manuel Antonio Chaves, the swashbuckling Hispanic frontiersman who helped seal the Union victory, is not a household name.
But three weeks before the monument's unveiling, the Associated Press published a story that detailed Chaves' violent raids against Native Americans.
For him, Chaves is a point of ancestral pride--a Hispanic Civil War hero forgotten by an unappreciative Anglo-American majority that has recorded history from its own perspective.
Chaves was born 200 years ago in the village of Atrisco, now a suburb of Albuquerque.