California Boasts New Seismic Warning Network

The University of California in Berkeley (UCB) is now finally linked to the state's only underwater seismic station, via a 32-mile underwater cable that has just recently been deposited on the ocean floor. Finally, the Californian seismic sensor network is centralized, with UCB receiving signals from West of the San Andreas fault line, as well as from other 31 land stations located all around the northern and the central parts of California.

“Before, we had to wait three months to even know if the instruments were alive.” Now, “We can use the data from the seafloor station in real time together with those from the rest of the Berkeley Digital Seismic Network,” UC Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science Barbara Romanowicz, who is also the director of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, explains.

With the help of the new grid, the location, magnitude and range of future earthquakes will be determined far more accurately, and the scientists watching the devices could maybe produce timely warnings that could help reduce the number of casualties.

The Farallon station is the only one in California to be located West of the San Andreas fault, with the other ones being located East of it. This layout makes it very difficult for the researchers to create a very correct and complex image of how earthquakes act in the region, which really renders all their ulterior efforts pointless. But the new station, dubbed MOBB, comes to fill this gap, even though it's just now starting to run, after having been placed on its current location in April 2002.

“Even though we correct for this lopsidedness, the calculations would be even more reliable if we could include data from more stations west of the fault; with the addition of MOBB, we achieve this goal,” Peggy Hellweg, who is a research geophysicist at the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, says on the UCB lab blog.

“How the interactions of waves couple to the ground is still an open question. MOBB will allow us to compare seismic data with data from buoys to determine the temporal and spatial relationships between ocean waves, infragravity waves and seismic waves,” Romanowicz concludes.