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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."
Good for fish, now they won't have their little fish houses falling on them during the night.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
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
Detecting the earthquake is only half the problem. As with the tsunami in 2004, the earthquake was detected, but there were no solid procedures in place to take action with the data. The information went unused for the most part as researchers were unsure who to call or what to do. Quite sad.
http://religiousfreaks.com/Good article. This technology should prove useful as we seek to understand the mysterious forces behind plate techtonics. However, scientists claim publicly to need more understanding of earthquakes. Privately, they know they are caused, in large part, by Chuck Norris roundhouse kicks....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
This is probably a stupid question, but could all of the undersea listening posts that were put in the ocean (to detect nuclear subs) during the cold war be used to detect earthquakes?
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
However, I don't think any amount of reasonable warning would have been enough to evacuate so many people as the Dec. '04 Tsunami. Sure, a great number of people could have made it out but you have to realize also that communication in some of those areas just isn't as fast as it is here - not to mention the crowded, overpopulated cities...it would take days to evacuate everyone and unfortunately there just isn't that kind of warning system available.
Liquifaction huh? Yup, that'll ruin your day alright: with the ground behaving like water, with actual cresting waves (a la the ocean!) causing trees to be actually thrown out of the ground, and houses (or what remains of them) to float on the surface like boats. I live on the Pacific Rim of Fire, in New Zealand, and the ground on which my house sits has a high chance of liquifaction. We ensured the house design includes a special "boat" design in the floor slab which hopefully means the house remains intact while it surfs around the neighbourhood. Hopefully I've survive also!
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
250000 people died from an earthquake on the seafloor and they only getting around to placing these things in 2007...
goddamn beauracrats
On the other hand, you might just be detecting your heartbeat if your sensors are that highly tunes. It's hard to say.
By golly.
Sig
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Only time will tell how far this system will be effective in real life crisis. Mel at windollars.blogspot.com
"Recording earthquakes on the sea floor
Posted by Roland Piquepaille @ 9:40 am"
for shame.
Trolling is a art,
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.
One hopes the seismometers won't be sensitive to notice the NSA tapping into the undersea fiberoptic cables!
SCO, Microsoft, P2P, what's your hot button?
The fact that earthquakes happen under the ocean is nothing new, we just don't know the overall "scale" of how many or how intense they are. It is recently known that earthquakes are on the rise in more and more places where they have not normally occurred before, and I think we will see (hear? sense? record?) even more occurrences of volcanic and magmatic activity the more we listen to the "gut reactions" of Earth's core so close to the sea floor, an area which, like the article said, usually has not been listened to much before.
I know this might seem like flamebait, but I assure everyone that I do NOT intend to start any kind of conflict or argument here. Just my opinion and I see this in the news of the world, more and more: always about more earthquakes going on than ever before. So, in light of the recent 30 years or more, mostly from what I have studied, I DO believe that the "End of the Age" eons ago foretold by Jesus the Christ, is even swifter approaching ...
Matthew 24:1-8 (King James Version)
Luke 21:5-11 (King James Version)
Read this page about Earthquakes by Century 7.0 and Higher
Signs of the End of the Age: Earthquakes on the increase!
What happened with the Earthquake near Indonesia that caused the Tsunami?
Earthquakes occurring in divverse places PREDICTED
9/11 Was An Inside Job! http://www.InfoWars.com/
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.
(sound it out... ok, maybe it was only funny to me.)
Teh article summary is very misleading. Just using land-based seismometers we are quite capable of detecting and locating pretty much every earthquake that occurs, whether it is on land or under sea. But this isn't really even what the article addresses. The whole point of the article is that up until now under-sea seismic observatories have been limited to either boradband recorders which are very sensitive (but can't accurately record high-intensity shaking) or accelerometers that only detect the strongest of shaking. All the article says is that a group from WHOI developed a system that includes both broadband and high-intensity seismometers/accelerometers, which they are going to deploy in a region known to have periodic high-intensity earthquakes (but also many smaller events). It isn't about locating under-sea earthquakes, it is about getting higher-quality information from those earthquakes. While it is relatively straightforward to locate and measure the relative intensity of earthquakes even from a very long distance, the lack of local measurement capabilities makes it very difficult to characterize the movements beyond a very basic level.
Things like tsunami detection/prediction (predicting whether an earthquake you detected could/did create a tsunami) require a better characterization of local ground movement than is possible from remote observatories, so that is one area these could potentialy help - but this is obviously not the purpose of this particular project (they are putting them around a transform fault system, which is not the type of fault you would expect to create tsunamis - unless they set off major undersea landslides).
... what those pesky "giant lizards are up to.
any word on when Edenite is going to be invented? It would make subocean research much easier.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The US Navy has had the entire North Atlantic and a lot of the Pacific too completely mapped with underwater sonobuoys that are in effect a sensitive grid of networked microphones underwater. The network has been there at least since the 1960's. Its purpose was to detect and track Soviet ballistic and attack submarines. I read that it was very effective - that the Russians could not send a sub out of their northwestern ports into the world without the US knowing which one and where it was. I'd be surprised if someone has NOT gotten a grant to see if these could be used to interpret sound generated underwater by earthquakes, and as a result track earthquake activity with them. Does anyone know if this grid can work this way?
Well not with US-Style advertising but working.
x -en.html
Based on a System used by GEOMAR before 2004.
http://www.ifm-geomar.de/index.php?id=2566&L=1
http://www.gfz-potsdam.de/html/projects/TEWS/inde
While the land based sensors can detect earthquakes deep in the ocean, having a sensor package near the actual event aids in multiple ways - better location of the actual movement - better understanding of what is moving.
Land based sensors can't give you the detailed information on ocean based earthquakes that you need to further the science of prediction. The article indicates the placement will be in an area know to have pre-cursor (ok spelling stinks) earthquakes, so local sensors could give the kind of warning that can save human lives.
The current nuclear monitoring system run by SAIC picks magnitude four naywhere in the world including the seafloor. It picks up 3.5s anywhere on land. These are about a smallest quakes a person can feel shaking. So the SAIC system picks up ANY quake int he world that could cause damage.
Of course its better for science to map smaller quakes. The Southern California Triple network is senstive to 1.5 anywhere in its area and in many places goes to fractional magnitude.
People here are very confused about the purpose of OBS. (sorry to pick on you, but yours was the smartest)
The title "Recording Earthquakes on the Sea Floor" might be less confusing if it was "Earthquake Recording on the Sea Floor". You say you need good Earth models to locate earthquakes. That's true, but the purpose here is the inverse. They are recording earthquakes to improve the Earth models. They drop a set of OBS in an area where they are unsure of the Earths morphology and use the recordings to create a more detailed model.
The source earthquakes could be anywhere on earth, land or sea. Mostly it's the angle path the wave takes that makes it useful or not. I've never seen OBS used for local earthquake. As far as I know they are too sensitive to accurately record them.
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