Of Popular Mechanics
The global COVID-19 pandemic (coronavirus) continues to have unprecedented seismic consequences. Now, the guardian Reports, the high frequency noise from human activities and industry has been cut in half.
It’s easy to understand why the amount of noise has changed so dramatically: People around the world are choosing (or ordered by their governments) to stay home, stop international and domestic travel, and move any work they can out of the office. . With far fewer flights, less car traffic, lighter loads in transit, and many factories and other heavy industries operating at or below partial capacity, most of humanity’s great noisemakers are temporarily out of service.
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Scientists have the equipment to measure the signals of the different seismological phenomena on Earth, be they earthquakes (the fundamental part of seismology) or other effects such as volcanoes and tsunamis. But human noise obscures the signals at the top end, just as our light pollution obscures the night sky.
“Seismometers in urban settings are important for maximizing the spatial coverage of seismic networks and for warning about local geological hazards, despite the fact that anthropogenic seismic noise degrades their ability to detect transient signals associated with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions,” they explain. the researchers in their article.
That means quiet time is useful in two huge ways at once. First, researchers can listen closely to Earth noise with the very low amount of human noise, and that data is likely to be invaluable to researchers doing seismic modeling and other work involving models based on levels and patterns of noise. Furthermore, stillness can help scientists studying human noise, be it, for example, from car traffic in particular or from local industry in general.
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In their research, lead author Thomas Lecocq and his colleagues at the Royal Observatory of Belgium found that instruments designed to measure a specific phenomenon such as road noise are picking up a much wider swath of Earth noise in the absence of traffic. intense car. That applied to local Belgian noise trackers, as well as global data from high-traffic tourist destinations like Barbados or Zugspitze, the highest mountain in Germany, where cable cars and a steep toothed railway rumble down the mountain every day. .
The reduced noise will allow seismologists to fine-tune their predictions even for small fault lines, which produce small earthquakes that can be very difficult to hear. And, according to the researchers, the data has confirmed a whole new interesting theory.
They explain:
“Anthropogenic seismic noise is believed to be dominated by noise sources of less than 1 [kilometer] far. However, the unique silent period of seismic noise 2020 reveals that when multiple stations or entire networks are considered over longer time scales, the anthropogenic seismic wave field affects large areas. ”
That means existing ideas about who and what is causing the interfering “human” noise are subject to change, and with months of data to consider, the full analysis can take years.
“With denser networks and more citizen sensors in urban settings, more seismic noise characteristics can be used, rather than just amplitude, and will help identify different sources of anthropogenic noise,” the researchers concluded.
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