Seismometer noise includes storms, 'footquakes' from soccer matches (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Seismometer noise includes storms, 'footquakes' from soccer matches (2011)

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18 pointstempestn7 comments

The effect of the recent lockdowns on seismic noise is discussed here if you want to read more about seismic noise:

https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2020/07/loc...

Wow that dark blue step change is really impressive, very cool.

edit: I wonder if you could establish a correlation between countries that went into lockdown but still had high levels of basal seismic activity and total number of corona infection cases? As in people not respecting lockdown guidelines or countries implementing partial/selective lockdown having higher infection rates.

It happens relatively commonly in Italy that fans from Naples' football team show up on the nearby seismometers on the Vesuvius[1].

It really shouldn't be that surprising to anyone who's ever attended a soccer match, you can practically feel thousands of tons of concrete flexing.

[1] E.g. in Italian, from a few years back: seismometers record fans shouting "the champions" in sync with Champion's League anthem, and this was only 40k people. https://twitter.com/Eurosport_IT/status/781503844920520704

In 1994 Rage Against the Machine was performing at Pinkpop (Netherlands) and the audience caused an earthquake of a magnitude 1 on the Richter scale.

That is a lot of energy, but still at the bottom of the Richter scale. According to Wikipedia: "Microearthquakes, not felt, or felt rarely. Recorded by seismographs.", occurring several million times per year.

Seismographs are just very sensitive.

> If you wander up to a seismograph in a museum, unless you are lucky enough to be there right during an earthquake, all you will see is a small wiggly signal being recorded.

If you walk up to one and jump nearby, you'll see a fairly significant signal being recorded. They're particularly sensitive, I've seen them picking up trucks driving a km or so away. They do know how to ignore this though.

For a nice country-wide seismograph display, there is: https://www.geonet.org.nz/earthquake/drums though (fortunately) it's looking a bit boring right now.

you have array of seismographs spaced out and with that you can remove 'local noice' vs distant significant even that will be recorded at each.

Up until a few years back, DC United played at RFK stadium, where the stands were made of metal. You could feel the metal move pretty severely when everyone was jumping up and down.

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