oops missed

Our intermittent 'system down' issue coincided with a shake , this one was before the one Paul reports we did get (post below this)...
Here the media update that alerted us :

 

And on our geophone trace - bottom half of screen - you can see the gap when it was not working is at the same time as the top section, which is the MAOK station, that does capture the quake!

Never mind - but thought we should be honest - we did miss one :-)

Another one hits

Over the weekend the trusty geophone sensor was moved to a new location.   Fortunately another small earthquake came along a few hours later just to reassure us that things were still working.

M2.9 earthquake about 50km from Oklahoma city

 This one was too small to be felt and quite a bit further away.   However a quick check with the Oklahoma Geological Survey seismic station in Oklahoma City, BCOK, shows a clear signal

Professional seismic station (lower figure) indicates where to look to find the seismic wiggle on our geophone (upper figure) 

Having a couple of seismic traces to compare side by side gives us the confidence to be sure that this small wiggle is due to the latest quake (scientists are not keen on the coincidence explanation)

Zooming in to the wiggle and filtering some of the noise away confirms that the geophone is still working in its new location (our geophone above, OGS professional sensor below) 

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 !