Earthquake Detective: Engaging Citizens in the Detection of Dynamically
Triggered Seismic Events
Abstract
We are engaging citizen scientists in an experiment to test if many
human ears can replace the process of a professional seismologist in
identifying dynamically triggered seismic events. Ordinarily, this
process involves interactive data processing and visualization efforts
on a volume of earthquake recordings (seismograms) that exploded during
the recent big-data revolution, for example through EarthScope. In this
citizen seismology project, we ask citizens to listen to relevant
sections of seismograms that are accelerated to audible frequencies.
This approach has five advantages: 1) The human ear implicitly performs
a time-frequency analysis and is capable of discerning a wide range of
different signals, 2) Many human ears listening to the same data
provides statistics that rank seismograms in order of their likelihood
to contain a recording of a triggered event, which is helpful to
researchers’ analysis of this data as well as to 3) the ability of a
deep-learning algorithm to model the boolean identifications or bulk
statistics of the analyses, 4) the project has the potential to enhance
informal learning because of the online platform that hosts the project,
Zooniverse, is available to people of all identities and hosts many
other citizen science projects, and 5) it helps prepare our team for
diverse post-graduation careers as part of IDEAS, an NRT program at
Northwestern University. The events we are asking citizens to help
identify via listening are small seismic events such as local
earthquakes and tectonic tremor, that occur in response to transient
stresses from passing seismic surface waves from a large, distant
earthquake. While much research progress has been made in understanding
how these events are triggered, there is no reliable deterministic
recipe for their occurrence. The aim of our project is to enlist the
help of citizens to increase the data set of known triggered seismic
events and known absences of triggered events in order to help
researchers unravel key aspects of that recipe. A better understanding
of triggered seismic events is expected to provide important clues
towards a fundamental understanding of all seismic activity, including
damaging earthquakes.