Hurricane Sandy Generated Seismic Shaking As Far Away As Seattle

If you weren’t on the East Coast during Hurricane Sandy, you likely experienced the disaster through electronic means: TV, radio, the internet or phone calls. As people across the country tracked the storm by listening to information broadcast through electromagnetic waves, a different kind of wave, produced by the storm itself, was traveling beneath their feet.

Keith Koper and Oner Sufri, a pair of geologists at the University of Utah, recently determined that the crashing of massive waves against Long Island, New York and New Jersey—as well as waves hitting each other offshore—generated measurable seismic waves across much of the U.S., as far away as Seattle. As Sufri will explain in presenting the team’s preliminary findings today during the Seismological Society of America‘s annual meeting, they analyzed data from a nationwide network of seismometers to track microseisms, faint tremors that spread through the earth as a result of the storm waves’ force.

The team constructed a video (below) of the readings coming from 428 seismometers over the course of a few days before and after the storm hit. Initially, as it traveled up roughly parallel to the East Coast , readings remained relatively stable. Then, “as the storm turned west-northwest,” Sufri said in a press statement, “the seismometers lit up.” Skip to about 40 seconds into the video to see the most dramatic seismic shift as the storm hooks toward shore:

The microseisms shown in the video differ from the waves generated by earthquakes. The latter arrive suddenly, in distinct waves, while the microseisms that resulted from Sandy arrived continuously over time, more like a subtle background vibration. That makes converting these waves to the moment magnitude scale used to measure earthquakes somewhat complicated, but Koper says that if the energy from these microseisms was compressed into a single wave, it would register as a 2 or 3 on the scale, comparable to a minor earthquake that can be felt by a few people but causes no damage to buildings.

The seismic activity peaked when Sandy changed direction, the researchers say, triggering a sudden increase in the number of waves running into each other offshore. These created massive standing waves, which sent significant amounts of pressure into the seafloor bottom, shaking the ground.

It’s not uncommon for events other than earthquakes to generate seismic waves—Hurricane Katrina produced shaking that was felt in California, landslides are known to have distinct seismic signatures and the meteor that crashed in Russia in February produced waves as well. One of the reasons the readings from Sandy scientifically interesting, though, is the potential that this type of analysis could someday be used to track a storm in real-time, as a supplement to satellite data.

That possibility is enabled by the fact that a seismometer detects seismic motion in three directions: vertical (up-and-down shaking) as well as North-South and East-West movement. So, for example, if most of the shaking detected by a seismometer in one location is oriented North-South, it indicates that the source of the seismic energy (in this case, a storm) is located either North or South of the device, rather than East or West.

A nationwide network of seismometers—such as Earthscope, the system that was used for this research and is currently still being expanded—could eventually provide the capacity to pinpoint the center of a storm. “If you have enough seismometers, you can get enough data to get arrows to point at the source,” Koper said.

Satellites, of course, can already locate a hurricane’s eye and limbs. But locating the energetic center of the storm and combining it with satellite observations of the storm’s extent could eventually enable scientists to measure the energy being released by a hurricane in real-time, as the storm evolves. Currently, the Saffir-Simpson scale is used to quantify hurricanes, but there are several criticisms of it—it’s solely based on wind speed, so it overlooks the overall size of a storm and the amount of precipitation in produces. Including the raw seismic energy released by a storm could be a way of improving future hurricane classification schemes.

The prospect of seismometers (instruments typically used to detect earthquakes) being employed to supplement satellites in tracking storms is also interesting because of a recent trend in the exact opposite direction. Last month, a satellite data was used for the first time to detect an earthquake by picking up extremely low pitched sound waves that traveled from the epicenter through outer space. The fields of meteorology and geology, it seems, are quickly coming together, reflecting the real-world interaction between the Earth and the atmosphere that surrounds it.

Joseph Stromberg | | READ MORE

Joseph Stromberg was previously a digital reporter for Smithsonian.