USA Today: EarthScope USArray passes halfway, rolling a blanket of quake sensors across the US
Government-paid agents may be coming to a neighborhood near you, burying their sensitive snooping equipment in quiet niches to keep an ear to the ground. They may already have been there as their sensor matrix moves west to east. For USA Today Jeff Martin has the story. The hardware is for a program called USArray, and is part of a larger one called EarthScope, that the National Science Foundation is footing. Its aim is to look deeply at the lithosphere underlying the nation.
Martin is a staffer at the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. His piece for USA Today focusses heavily on just one aspect of the array’s purpose – to measure local seismicity and earthquake hazards. This may mislead readers and suggest to them that this is done primarily for their immediate, practical benefit. As far as I can tell, the main incentive is far more general and basic in nature. It is to get a snapshot of the lithosphere’s hidden landscape of faults, rock types, stratigaphic zones, and other geotectonic details across and deeply under broad regions. Those may delight earth scientists. They might not be of much practical use for seismic safety.
I’ve known about this for awhile, mainly because friend Horst Rademacher and his wife Peggy Hellweg let the program put a detector on a property they own along the western rise of the Sierras. Their both geophysicists – and he’s a science writer as well. This USA Today story will catch millions of Americans up on the program’s existence, if not much of its justification. It started on the West Coast and is now moving through the Great Lakes on the North and oil-threatened Gulf Coast on the south. It is not mapping local seismicity, but its 400 sensors provide detailed maps of tectonic structures and such via finely-gridded measurement how waves from distant quakes move through. Hardware from the westernmost side of this traveling grid gets moved to the east side periodically, and on it rolls.
An archive search finds a few previous sample stories from regional outlets as the USArray reached their neighborhoods:
- Havasu Sun Herald (Arizona, Feb 16, 2006) Sarah Reynolds: Seismic sensor placed at Hualapai Mountain Park ;
- Uttomwa Courier (Iowa, June 18, 2009) - Matt Milner: EarthScope coming to southern Iowa ;
Grist for the Mill: EarthScope USArray ;
- Charlie Petit
