Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Seismology and tsunamis:making waves


For a long time, geologists have always known that some marine earthquakes generate fierce tsunamis whilst others donot. But as the situation in Japan has demonstrated, there is no way of telling the difference until a wave arrives.However, a better and new earth quake monitoring system developed by Andrew Newman and Jaime Convers at the Georgia Institute of Technology may however help to change that. This system taps into hundreds of of seismic monitoring stations around the world and when an earthquake is detected, the software immediately looks at the size of the tremor and the location of its epicentre. The full article is available in this issue of the Economist in the ORI library.

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