Oceanic Sounds of Last Year's Earthquake

DoctorBit writes "Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory is reporting that some of their researchers have analyzed recordings of the underwater sound produced by last year's magnitude 9.3 Sumatra earthquake. By studying the ocean's sound waves rather than the Earth's seismic waves, the researchers measured the earthquake's speed and duration with unprecedented accuracy."

Comments

Detecting Submarines

[reporter]

The phrase "unprecedented accuracy" seems to imply that this technique can detect very minute underwater sounds. Would this technology also be applicable to detecting the barely detectable sounds of underwater nuclear submarines?

Re:192kbps

[DrHanser]

Of course it would have been better if it was recorded as a VBR recording. Let's also not forget that bit for bit, AAC is arguably better than MP3.

Not all formats are created equal; bitrate is a pisspoor measure of audio quality. This is also not music, this is a sound -- there is a huge difference when encoding audio.