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Recording Earthquakes on the Sea Floor
Roland Piquepaille writes "The vast majority of the earthquakes are located underneath the oceans where they are not recorded because of a lack of instruments. This is why the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has developed a new kind of ocean bottom seismometers (OBSs) to record both small and large earthquakes on the sea floor. Forty of them will be deployed at the beginning of 2007 in an area of the Eastern Pacific Ocean known to have large earthquakes. One goal of this one-year mission is to better understand earthquake processes, but this technology could soon be used to better monitor other parts of the oceans. Read more for additional details and pictures about this new technology."
Earthquakes at the bottom of the ocean are known to generate devastating tsunamis, as the Indian Ocean one on 2004.
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I may be incorrect, but I believe that it is possible to detect seisemic activity from anywhere on the planet provided that the sensors are sensitive enough. With this in mind, detection is one thing, but actually interpreting the data as well as doing something useful with it is another thing. Geolocation with sensitive instruments requires MASSIVE amounts of computational power as well as a very good model of the Earth's transmittance dynamics. technologies which I'm sure certain governments are quite skilled at.
On the other hand, a massive distributed sensor network would be quite useful as it would be more sensitive and would be able to geo-locate w/o the use of supercomputers!
Matthew Wong http://www.themindofmatthew.com
the region they're setting up the array, the east pacific rise (about 4S,104W), is what's known as a spreading center. places are spreading apart from eachother more or less uneventfully.
there are earthquakes, but due to the nature of the fault they aren't that big--if at all noticable to anything but a machine. the sumatra "tsunami" quake was a subduction zone fault, there was a lot of slippage and a lot of vertical displacement on the ocean floor. comparitively, it was about 10^5 times greater than anything you're going to get on the EPR.
the aim with this project is to get a better sense of the physical structure of the ocean crust around this anomalous spreading center by interpreting local earthquake travel times throughout the region.
unfortunately there's not a lot anyone can do about tsunamis besides monitoring the height of waves at various regions in the ocean and hoping 5 hours is enough time to evacuate.
It's a Kinemetrics/Quanterra model Q330. There is a PC-104 based single board computer that records data to hard disk located in another sphere.