Spectrograph of 2004 Parkfield CA earthquake — taken from http://geophysics.eas.gatech.edu/people/zpeng/EQ_Music/#part1_1
Today’s DTM Seminar speaker was Prof. Zhigang Peng from GA Tech‘s Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Dept. He talked about a kind of earthquake (he called “tremors”) that is triggered when the seismic waves from another larger earthquake pass by. The relationship between earthquake duration and strength (as measured by the seismic moment) for these tremor quakes is apparently much different than for normal earthquakes, suggesting they result from different geophysical mechanisms.
The part of the talk that stuck out most for me was when Prof. Peng played the “sound” of an earthquake, generated by speeding up the seismic vibrations from measured earthquakes. This “earthquake music” is available on his website, but I have posted one such recording below. Apparently, different kinds of earthquakes make different sounds, and so these recordings can be used to tease out information about the quakes.
