MERMAIDs Detect Distant Earthquakes
Two small, mobile torpedo-shaped buoys plying the waters of the
Mediterranean Sea have captured the seismic signature of a magnitude-7
earthquake occurring some 10,000 kilometres away. The earthquake, in the
Aleutian Islands near Alaska on 24 June, was documented by two floating
seismic observatories nicknamed MERMAIDs (for Mobile Earthquake Recorder
in Marine Areas by Independent Divers), and reported in the journal Eos
this week by a team led by Yann Hello of the Géoazur laboratory at the
University of Nice in Villefranche-sur-Mer, France.
Hydrophones aboard the free-floating MERMAIDs record seismic P-waves,
one component of earthquake waves that travel through the centre of
Earth. The experimental buoys that the team released for a few weeks
this summer drifted with the sea's currents at depths of up to 2
kilometres, and the two recorded the same Aleutian event from different
locations in the Mediterranean.
Once they have a fleet of buoys at sea, that offset will allow Hello and
his colleagues to compare the P -wave paths to see how the waves travel
from the source of an earthquake to hydrophones on the other side of the
world.
Read more:
http://ow.ly/6TGcF
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