Seismic Waves Across the U.S.

Excellent video from the EarthScope project, showing the seismic waves from the August 23rd earthquake zipping across the United States. Note that the height of the wave was only 20 micrometers (20 millionths of a meter or 0.02 mm) as it passed through the midwest.

One question that might occur is, why are there so many seismic stations in the middle of the continent? My guess is that it has to do with monitoring of the New Madrid fault zone, which produced

More details about the earthquake can be found on its IRIS page.

(via Bad Astronomy)

Leave a Reply