Subtle shakingThe city of Pasadena, California is an interesting place. It is home to the USGS earth

Subtle shakingThe city of Pasadena, California is an interesting place. It is home to the USGS earthquake scientists who plan and coordinate emergency response for the Los Angeles area, it is just down the road from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and every year on New Year’s Day a suite of flower-bearing floats marches down Colorado Boulevard through the city. Combining several of those themes – this float in 2005 was produced by JPL and features a whole bunch of their spacecraft (How many can you ID?). It turns out, these floats also can be used for the other topic – testing seismic sensors.The City of Pasadena has several fiber optic cables in their boundary that are currently not being used. A team led by Caltech/USGS scientists plugged into one of those cables and designed a computer algorithm that can turn it into a brand new type of sensor for seismic activity. As waves of energy move through the ground, the position of the fiber optic line changes, leading to detectable changes in the wavelength and frequency of the light moving through them. Measurements of these minute changes can be then fed to a computer and turned into a measurement of shaking.The team of scientists originally set their system up last year, but they didn’t experience any nearby earthquakes they could use to test the system. But, on New Year’s Day, traffic around the city is low because everyone’s at the parade, and the only thing moving is the floats down the street. As seen in these photos, the system was able to detect the tiny vibration of the floats moving along the ground, the bands as they marched, and even the vibration of the motorcycle riders who head out in front of the floats to clear the path.Several cities with these sorts of fiber optic networks have begun setting up systems to use them as sensitive seismic detectors; apparently the main issue is computer memory and processing power, but if you have that, then fiber optic lines in a city can be used as a brand new type of seismograph. Eventually they may be deployable elsewhere, in places where it is difficult or damaging to use traditional seismic detection systems, such as in the arctic or in the ocean.The loudest band in 2020 was from Southern University and A&M College, a the largest HBCU in the state of Louisiana.-JBBImage credits: The post author (photo) and the paper (below)Original paper: https://doi.org/10.1785/0220200091Reference: https://bit.ly/2XW75qz -- source link

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