Enlarge / The Raspberry Shake, a simple seismograph based on Raspberry Pi hardware. (credit: Mike Hotchkiss, Raspberry Shake) On the afternoon of January 12, 2010, a magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck about 16 miles west of Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince. Among the most significant seismic disasters recorded, more than 100,000 people lost their lives. The damage—costing billions of […]
Enlarge / Eagle Plume Tower in Bears Ears, Utah. Geologists at the University of Utah have developed a mathematical model to predict the fundamental resonant frequencies of this and similar formations based on the particular formations’ geometry and material properties. (credit: Geohazards Research Group) The striking red rock towers and arch formations peppered throughout Southern […]
Enlarge / InSight places a wind shield over its seismometer. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) NASA’s InSight lander installed a seismograph on Mars, and the marsquakes it detected have helped us map the planet’s interior. This data provides the big picture of Mars’ internals—how big the core is, whether anything is molten, and so on. But it doesn’t […]
Enlarge (credit: NOAA) People tend to think of seismic waves as little more than signals of tectonic events, like an earthquake or lava shifting under a volcano. But these vibrations are also our best way of getting a clear picture of our planet’s internal structure. By watching how the vibrations’ paths shift as they encounter […]