Earthquake Seismographs for Volunteers to Operate in K-12

Classrooms

Wayne D. Pennington

Shannon E. Bair

Seth R. Lemke

Michigan Technological University

• Project background

• The plan

• Software development and features

• Where we’re headed

Purpose

• To provide low-cost earthquake seismographs for use by volunteers in schools.

• Expose students to geophysics and hands-on science early in their education.

Similar Programs

• MichSeis– Larry Ruff,

Univ.of Michigan

• PEPP– Princeton Earth

Physics Project

Permanent, near-research quality observatories

History of the Project

UUpper

PPeninsula

SSeismic

EExperiments

IIn

SSchools

• MichSeis and PEPP programs are designed for permanent installations and dedicated staff

• Teachers wanted a temporary seismic station

• Needed user-friendly program

• Grant from SEG made this possible

The Plan

• Develop a user-friendly, interactive program

• Use an extremely simple and portable system

A to D Converter

How do we do this?

• Use the low-cost EAI S102 long-period seismograph

• Use a Macintosh or PC with an inexpensive A to D converter

• Write user-friendly interface with LabView software

What is LabView?

• Software that uses the iconic programming language G.

Name of file to which data is currently being written.

Amplitude of signal at this instant (changes each second).

Current instant; record is added to end, rather than scrolling across.

Data recorded prior to midnight (yesterday, in Universal Time) is shown in gray, indicating that it is nearly one day old.

Night-time background noise level.

The Stomp and yell box shows the output from a hi-frequency geophone, designed to dramatically show the effect of jumping in front of the seismograph (not recorded).

Data recorded since midnight (Universal Time) is shown in yellow, in these four-hour blocks.

Universal Time, so that earthquakes can be identified from global observations.

Today’s date

Local Time

Slider-bar controlfor instantly chang-ing the display gain of the day’s record.

Slider-bar control for instantly changing the display gain of the 1/2-hour record.

SurfaceWaves

P-Wave

The most-recent 30 minutes, continually scrolling slowly across to the left.

Option to record data at one sample or 10 samples

per second

Indian Ocean earthquake, June 18, 2000 Mb=7.8

Now that we’ve recorded an earthquake, we can look at it in different ways using the Viewer program:

First, let’s look at a whole day of data.

Next, let’s save the portion of the day containing the quake.

Name of quake file

Starting Time

Length of Time

Scrollbars allow you to search the data to find the quake

We can also recreate the earthquake arrival.

Now we can stretch the quake to identify the waves.

Finally, we have several filtering options.

The Future

• Test the program in Upper Peninsula schools

• Train volunteers to work with their local schools

• Provide one day training courses in conjunction with SEG, AAPG, AGU, IRIS, and other local societies

Acknowledgments

• SEG Foundation

• Larry Ruff, University of Michigan