Definitely more than 70, but not all can be felt. GSWA field staff were easily feeling magnitude 2+ events while installing the seismographs. Nice to see the 24-hour "drum" image from the @earthquakes.au Seismosphere system featured. Data visualisation at its best!
www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02...
There is an active earthquake swarm near Gnowangerup in Western Australia. Here is the last 24 hours of recordings from one of GSWA's Rapid Deployment stations. Of yesterday's several hundred earthquakes, the largest on screen was only M2.5. A magnitude Mw5.0 earthquake occurred in this area in 2023
Watching it roll across our network on the @earthquakes.au YouTube live stream
70% of the buildings in the Central Business District of Christchurch had to be demolished after the magnitude 6.1 earthquake occurred under the city in 2011, only 6 months after a magnitude 7.1 that had occurred 40km away had already damaged buildings in Christchurch
Unfortunately that seems to be the case, and no doubt an issue in the country’s north.
I’m at a dam and climate conference in India, and I had never heard the acronym GLOF before, but it’s definitely the buzz word here.
We need more flowers at our meetings. It’s an impressive display, and rather calming.
2025 earthquake recap. Guess how many.
Interesting that Victoria’s largest earthquake was a single magnitude 3 earthquake last year. Remember only a few years ago when it seemed like Victorians were feeling an earthquake every few months? That’s the dynamic earth for you.
It’s the 50th anniversary of @earthquakes.au and it all started when I was 5 years old with a magnitude 1.4 near my house. How cute was I?
Congratulations to everyone who has contributed to the success of the SRC over the decades, and to those taking Australian seismology into the future.
Abstracts are closing in the next 24 hours, so join our “Seismology for All” session to raise awareness for tools and initiatives that might help those getting into our branch of STEM - excuse the unintentional botanical pun 🍃
Do you just mean hardware costs? I would have thought staff time and travel costs would often outweigh the cost of the hardware on a lot of projects.
Have you got something to share with the seismological community about making STEM more accessible? I’ll be talking about how software developed by @earthquakes.au is helping students and early career professionals analyse data. Join this session at the @seismosocam.bsky.social meeting this April.
2025: the year when the first fault rupture was captured on video. Onshore, large, surface rupturing earthquakes are so rare, and to have a camera recording that close to the rupture and framed so well is potentially a once in a lifetime event.
Source video is here:
youtu.be/77ubC4bcgRM
When I posted a version of this video last year, I underestimated the equivalent energy of a magnitude 9.1 earthquake relative to a nuclear blast by a factor of 10. This time I’ve quantified it using the Trinity test (as seen in the movie Oppenheimer). The 1957 underground test was 10x smaller again
If you can get yourself to WA I reckon I can get you involved. I’ll make some enquiries about the next trip.
My last trip to Western Australia wasn’t just to collect seismic data, but also involved setting up magnetotelluric stations and deploying networks of nodes to characterise the velocity profile at each site. It was nice to be able to use my drone to get a different perspective of our field work.
It might. Recent overseas purchases arrived in just over a week, but postal services are probably getting busier by the day…
Holiday gift idea for the earthquake nerd in your life. We made a few extra SEISMOLOGY MEGAQUAKE t-shirts, and they are on sale at src.com.au. We only have a few left, particularly in the larger sizes, so get in quick.
📦 FREE SHIPPING UNTIL 18 DEC 📦
Add coupon code ROCKMYWORLD in the cart checkout
I rotated the data vertically to line up with the set list. So, Y-axis is time, starting at the top. The spectrogram is 1Hz to 5Hz (left to right, log plot) with brightness indicating the intensity of the frequency at the time. The green trace is vertical ground velocity over time.
Faultless earthquakes? Several recent earthquake swarms in southwest Western Australia appear to be volume rupture sequences that don’t appear to occur in a plane to indicate a faulting structure, even after HypoDD reanalysis of 400 aftershocks.
It’s concert season in Melbourne. Last weekend Lady Gaga was rocking Marvel Stadium hard enough to shake our office seismometer 5.6km (3.5mi) away. Here’s the set list order plotted next to frequency and ground motion over time.
Looks more like a reflection survey!
Look what a colleague brought back from NZ for me. Aftersocks! I’m intensity 12 🦶
Limited stock and sizes remain, so get in quick if you want a MegaQuake t-shirt. Free shipping deal is on between now and 18 December, so get in early if you want one to arrive in time to put under your tree these holidays.
First hand proof: Lenny Kravitz got Melbourne jumping last night! I correlated my video timing with the seismic recording. He’s so cool, and equally hot. Lenny is all the temperatures.
There were only 4 frames (one per iteration), so we just animated frames between them to reveal how the earthquakes moved between iterations. It helps to tell more of a story. It’s difficult to tell what’s changing otherwise
HypoDD visualisation!
Last week I presented a paper on the reanalysis of an aftershock sequence using the double difference method, and used this animation to show how the event locations moved in depth and lat/long with each iteration. About 450 events, with a stable result after only 4 iterations.
I was genuinely surprised at the AEES conference dinner tonight when the committee presented me with lifetime membership to the Society, joining only 5 others given this honour in the Society’s 35 years. I’m scaling back my AEES duties for a few years, but I’ll always be lurking in the background 🤓
Oh, don’t worry, @geophysichick.bsky.social knows she has been my inspiration for all of this music concert monitoring business. Jackie is the original and the best!
AC/DC played Melbourne again on Sunday night. There was a 12% higher peak in ground-pounding tunes compared to last Wednesday. The frequency "heat map" pattern was similar in timing and relative intensity, but slightly clearer this time. 🤘
There is no comparison between Melbourne and Sydney (on so many levels), so let’s not even start that debate!
