QuakeFinder Blog

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.

On October 4, 2013 Tom Bleier, Vice President, QuakeFinder Humanitarian R&D gave a tech talk at Google on the topic of “Is it possible to Forecast Earthquakes?” This link is to the 53 minute talk.

Lightning strikes are a common occurrence which QuakeFinder sites can detect. Unfortunately, a lightning strike looks very similar to the earthquake pulses that we look for prior to large quakes. The rise time of a lightning strike’s magnetic component is faster, and the lightning pulse duration is shorter than the ground-based magnetic pulses. Utilizing information provided to us by our friends at Earth Networks, we also have independent confirmation for lightning strikes. They generously donate daily lightning event files for the entire planet. We are tuning our algorithms to sort through these large files to select the strikes at an appropriate distance from each of our 140 sites to “mask out” the suspect pulses. The remaining pulses are then counted for analysis of pre-quake activity.

In addition to contaminating our data, lightning can actually damage our equipment. Our site in Hangshen, Taiwan was hit by lightning which fried all the electronics and damaged the battery. This site is being replaced this month in addition to two new sites installed in Taiwan. Earlier this month, a lightning strike destroyed a 120VAC surge suppressor feeding our site in Pt. Arena, California. Tim, the site owner at that location, identified the problem and quickly replaced the surge suppressor. Thank you Tim! We appreciate all our site owners for allowing us to use their land and assisting with minor maintenance.