Quakefinder Blog

The massive M8.2 quake near Iquique, Chile on April 1 reminds us that the northern area of Chile near the Peru border had been long overdue for a large earthquake. QuakeFinder has been concerned about this area since 2010 when we installed 4 sites on the Peru side of the border. In January 2014 we installed a new site 40 miles (approximately 64 kilometers) south of Iquique, working with our partners at Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile in Santiago, Universidad de Concepción, Universidad Andrés Bello (UNAB), and Center of the Desert in Iquique. The earthquake happened to the NW of Iquique about 90 miles (144 kilometers) from that site. Our range of detection is around 10 miles (16 kilometers), but the M7.8 was 27 miles (44 km) from our site and may show that the aftershocks are migrating closer to our lone site there. Our small network in Chile needs to be expanded to cover more critical areas, and we are continuing to look for partners to assist in this effort.  With this site near Iquique, we are excited to be in the right area and continuing analysis of these quakes will advance the state of the art of earthquake forecasting. Get involved. Contact us at supportQF@quakefinder.com

There was a major earthquake (M6.9) off the northern coast of California on Sunday, March 9, 2014, about 50 miles west of Eureka.

• Geographic coordinates: 40.821N, 125.128W
• Magnitude: 6.9
• Depth: 7 km
• Universal Time (UTC): 10 Mar 2014  05:18:12
• Time near the Epicenter: 9 Mar 2014  21:18:12

QuakeFinder has several sites near the north coast. The closest site, Ferndale (site number 830) is located 47 miles east of  the epicenter (which was near the “Triple Junction” of 3 fault lines). Although our anticipated range of detection for precursor signals is approximately 10 miles, we performed a preliminary analysis of our data (including from 6 additional nearby sites) to determine if there were any subtle indications before the quake. So far, as expected, we have not seen any indications in the data. Analysis continues.        

QuakeFinder is getting close to finishing the deployment of the earthquake monitoring sites along the major faults in California. We currently have 132 sites installed in California, but we have a problem. There are several areas that are magnetically noisy (e.g. along the Hayward fault in the San Francisco-East Bay, in the LA area, including Palos Verde, Long Beach, Seal Beach, Huntington Beach, Carson, Hollywood, and Ventura). These are areas where the fault lines are located near highly congested neighborhoods, and magnetometers don’t work very well due to the proximity to man-made noise (e.g. BART trains, cars, houses, machinery, oil drilling, etc.). However, Ion sensors do work in these congested locations. Rather than give up, we decided to develop a “Mini-Monitor” instrument that includes 2 Ion detectors, temperature, humidity, and air pressure sensors—but no magnetometers. Furthermore, we decided to make these instruments into “kits” so that we could donate them to high schools as part of a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Project. In December, we donated 7 of 20 kits to 7 high schools along the Hayward Fault. Early this year, we plan to donate another 13 kits to the LA areas listed above and other schools that might be interested in participating in this STEM project. The idea is to have high school students build the kits and install them at their schools or parents’ homes, to connect them to our QuakeFinder Data Center via the Internet, and to share the data with the world along with all the other 132 QuakeFinder magnetometer and ion sites. Furthermore, they will be able to download their instrument’s data to actually participate in our earthquake forecasting research—or to use the data as part of a more general weather or pollution monitoring experiment. If you know of a high school that might be interested in participating, please have them contact us.