Advancing earthquake science worldwide
15 April 2022–As SSA President, John Townend has been at the helm of the society as it weathered the challenges of a pandemic and a virtual annual meeting, but the past year has led to new insights as well. “The pandemic has forced us to adapt the ways we meet … Continue Reading »
13 April 2022–The rise of fiber-optic distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) in seismology could prove a useful addition to earthquake early warning systems, researchers write in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America. DAS uses the tiny internal flaws in a long optical fiber as thousands of seismic sensors. An … Continue Reading »
16 March 2022–Seismic and acoustic data recorded 50 meters away from a research nuclear reactor could predict whether the reactor was in an on or off state with 98% accuracy, according to a new study published in Seismological Research Letters. By applying several machine learning models to the data, researchers … Continue Reading »
14 March 2022–As the Regional ShakeAlert Coordinator for the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, Mouse Marie Reusch often fields questions about earthquake early warning from the public. “For earthquake early warning, a big misconception is that it’s prediction, and it’s not,” Reusch explained. “An earthquake has already started somewhere, and we’re … Continue Reading »
9 March 2022–Papers on distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) and machine learning techniques were among the topics covered by the top 20 most-downloaded papers published by the SSA family of journals in 2021. The ranking of all papers noted below reflect download numbers through 31 December 2021: Y.J. Tan et al., … Continue Reading »
2 March 2022–Researchers were able to observe stress changes before and during an earthquake induced by hydraulic fracturing in Alberta, Canada, with the help of a phenomenon called seismic anisotropy. Seismic anisotropy refers to changes in the velocity of seismic waves dependent on the “fabric” of the rocks that the … Continue Reading »