Got One! Major County gets a 3.5

With a bit of help from Paul and the media we have this one. It showed up ok on our station but not really at all on MAOK.

You might spot that our recording trace line was broken only a couple of hours earlier ...not sure why but we just restarted the system and it all came back on line.  So the problem is not fully diagnosed I guess. Generally its all holding steady. On the trace you can see when we are busy in the room. Tomorrow this station will be relocating to a different windowsill when we move room.

Waiting for a quake!

Like waiting for the wind when you want to go sailing sometimes you have to be patient...
 Here Ben fills some time with the cube and some origami!

 

And then a breakfast discussion with David from the Staybridge Hotel who recalls the last quake they felt and its epicentre orientation versus us! - See the 'Reflections' blog post further up for video from David and others regarding their experiences

 

Online at Last

After some splendid gadgeteering by Steve the roving schoolboy seismologist is now online, streaming live seismic data to the entire interweb.

Live seismic data from Oklahoma.  Top is from amateur site Oklahoma-Shakes, bottom is from Ben's geophone, each line shows 1hour of data wrapping around to the next hour on the next line (8 hours total) time is UTC (or GMT for the oldies)

If you want to track seismic data from Oklahoma from here in the UK these data streams can be viewed online by installing the software jAmaSeis from https://www.iris.edu/hq/inclass/software-web-app/jamaseis

This free software runs on any computer and lets you monitor live data from remote stations.    Choose remote station KEYWB  for Ben's seismic station or MAOK for another station in Oklahoma  in the source configuration wizard (MAOK is a bit quieter than Ben's as it located away from people on a ground-floor location)

HINT you can adjust the amplitude of traces by clicking on the SCALE button (bottom right) for each trace 

The first earthquake !

Well that was unexpected... within a couple of hours of setting up the geophone in Ben's room there was a magnitude 3.2 earthquake in Edmond (a suburb of Oklahoma city about 20km away)

Fortunately we were able to view the signal from this earthquake on a couple of professional seismic stations run by the Oklahoma geological survey in Oklahoma city.

M3.2 earthquake recorded on professional stations in Oklahoma city

the same quake captured on Ben's geophone

It might look small but the time and shape of this wiggle confirm it really is our first earthquake 

Given that the geophone was stuck to a windowsill with bluetack on the 4th floor I think that this counts as a remarkable success !

Day One: setting up the sensor

After arriving in Oklahoma and checking into their accommodation Ben and his father, Steve were keen to start seismology.    They had some basic equipment on loan from the UK school seismology project.   A laptop, running jAmaseis (free datalogging and analysis software designed for use in schools), an old geophone (a sensor which converts ground vibrations into voltages) an old digitser (to convert the voltages into computer readable numbers) and a whole mess of cables.

 

During a  late night skype call to Paul Denton, (leader of the school seismology project at the BGS and also a resident of Oakham) Ben gets stuck into the technical details of setting up his own monitoring station.    Lessons learned 

1) cable spaghetti not only looks messy but often stops things working.

2) if things are not working for no apparent reason, switch the computer off and on again... it really works ! 

 

Finally success... a jump test confirms the sensor is working.

 

All we need to do now is wait for an earthquake ! 

   

From Oakham to Oklahoma

Travelling to Oklahoma for 10 weeks instead of starting year 8 at secondary school sounds like a dream come true.   However if the reason is to receive ground-breaking proton beam therapy for a recently discovered tumour it starts to look like a lot less fun.   Also missing school for months at this age can be a real problem for your education so Ben's parents started asking around for potential educational activities to keep him thinking and provide some engaging distractions from the therapy sessions.

Earthquakes and seismology might not seem like the obvious solution, however Ben is from Oakham in Rutland, which due to a spate of 9 earthquakes in 2014-15 earned the dubious title of "earthquake capital of Britain"

 

Unfortunately the earthquakes (maximum magnitude 3.8) were missed by Ben who was either asleep or on holiday when they all happened, so he was quite excited to learn that Oklahoma had since 2009 become the "earthquake capital of America"

So Ben agreed to become a "roving schoolboy seismologist" for the UK school seismology project, (an educational outreach project run by the British Geological Survey) and to monitor any unusual seismic activity going on in Oklahoma during his stay.