Scientists Monitor Earthquakes Real Time

Friday June 4, 2010

(This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.)

On April 4, 2010, at 3:40 p.m., southern Californians experienced approximately 90 seconds of earth shaking as the state felt its largest earthquake since 1992.

Coined the El Mayor-Cucapah Earthquake, the epicenter was 39 miles southeast of Calexico (Baja California, Mexico), measured 7.2 on the Richter scale, and resulted in several hundred injuries and several fatalities in Mexico.

To better understand earthquakes like El Mayor-Cucapah, researchers have set up GPS instruments throughout the state of California, as part of the California Real Time Network (CRTN). The CRTN is led by Yehuda Bock of the University of California, San Diego, and consists of more than 130 continuous GPS receivers run by numerous agencies.

The CRTN site depicted above is located in San Diego County and connected to the NSF-funded High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN), which allows researchers to stream real-time data from the GPS instruments to their laboratories for analysis and display on the web.

The GPS data transmitted over HPWREN are then analyzed on-the-fly to compute the instrument's position, along with total displacement waveforms – both seismic (dynamic) and static (coseismic). Learn more about how these types of instruments work during seismic events such as the recent El Mayor-Cucapah earthquake here.

Source: http://www.livescience.com/researchinaction/ria-100604.html

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