UF students help with project to measure seismic activity across U.S.

June 30, 2011

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Two University of Florida undergraduate students are spending the summer participating in an ambitious project to measure seismic activity across the United States.

By the end of July, juniors Guriel Zeigerman of Coral Springs and Marko Steiger of Fort Myers will have found sites spaced roughly every 45 miles for placement of 24 seismometers near the Florida-Georgia border from the Panhandle to Savannah.

“The students’ role is to find isolated sites far away from roads and railroads, talk to landowners to get their permission for placing the data stations, take measurements of the sites and make sure there’s a cellphone network to send the data,” said geological sciences assistant professor Mark Panning, who is supervising the students.

These stations are part of a National Science Foundation-sponsored project coordinated by the Incorporated Research Institutes of Seismology or IRIS, a consortium of universities.

This winter IRIS will install each data station by digging a 7-foot-deep hole and pouring an 18-inch-thick concrete pad at the bottom to secure a plastic pipe about 86 inches high and 42 inches in diameter. Once the concrete is set, a seismometer will be placed on the concrete base inside the pipe along with batteries and electronic recording equipment. A watertight lid will protect the station.

“The seismometers are very sensitive and can pick up vibrations from earthquakes worldwide of magnitude 5 or 6 and above which occur nearly every day somewhere,” Panning said. Part of a larger project called EarthScope, he said the goal is to enable a “telescopic” look at the Earth beneath the U.S.

By recording and mapping seismic waves from earthquakes, a 3-D picture of what’s underground can be created. For a good picture in any specific area, much information about the waves going through that area is needed. In locations like Florida and Georgia that have very few, if any, earthquakes, the only way to get that information is to install many stations there.

Places such as California where there are frequent earthquakes have always had ample funding for seismometers.

“On the quieter East Coast, we have much less data, and therefore we know much less about what’s going on in the Earth below,” Panning said. “Installing seismometers here means we’ll be getting exciting new data with an opportunity to make really new discoveries.”

Since the program began in 2005 and including this summer’s activity, sites for almost 1,200 seismometers in 30 states will have been located. Eckerd College is handling siting in the rest of Florida this summer with other schools covering the area north to Wisconsin and Ontario. The data stations will remain in place for about two years and then the equipment will be relocated to sites elsewhere until the entire U.S. has been studied.

“The data gathered will be publicly available online at the IRIS data management center in real time and will be used by researchers across the world,” Panning said. “People who host stations can observe what is gathered as it happens on any computer. It’s not likely we’ll discover there’s a big earthquake risk in Florida, but until you look, you don’t know what you’ll see. Until now the only place with this type of dense coverage is Japan. It has never been done before on a continental scope.”