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Quick hits to wrap up the week: Looking into a skylight at Kilauea. Image taken July 8, 2010, courtesy of HVO/USGS. Following up some news about Changbaishan/Changbai caldera in North Korea, Yang Qingfu, director of earthquake and volcano analysis and forecast center with the seismology bureau of…
Not much in volcano news, however a lot of earthquake news this morning. Did anyone else notice that two M6+ earthquakes occurred last night within one minute of each other last night (eastern daylight time)? The first was in the Banda Sea near Indonesia at 01:51:19 UTC (M6.8), the next was in…
Some news for a busy Tuesday: The crater at Poas volcano in Costa Rica, taken February 25, 2010. Image courtesy of OVSICORI by Federico Chavarria. After the MSNBC debacle, it is nice to see some good articles on why the Chilean earthquake was overall less disastrous than the Haitian earthquake,…
A hot spring in Yellowstone National Park. Image courtesy of the USGS. Yesterday I left a little teaser about the current earthquake swarm going on at the Yellowstone Caldera. Eruptions readers have come through with even more information on the swarm. Over 250 earthquakes have occurred in the…

No LISS? Not that many people can understand the data ...

I was involved with IRIS (and another network whose name I forget) about 20 years ago. Those were exciting times - the digital broadband seismometer had been developed by the USGS and DoE (and a number of small and huge businesses); it must have been the first significant development in instrumentation since the invention of the galvanometer recorders and it was a huge change. Being a new instrument (already extensively tested in the lab though), aside from the broadband sensor we plugged the old long-period sensors into the system for comparison over a few years. The instruments were remarkable for their era; all the changes in technology since have resulted in refinements of the sensor and I can now pack the electronics into something the size of a lunchbox (and the instrument can cost as much as a car rather than as much as a mansion).

By MadScientist (not verified) on 02 Feb 2010 #permalink

2 great free iPhone apps: USGS Seismic, which displays the USGS recent earthquake feed (tap on a quake to get full info), and USGS, which shows recent USGS news and also lists recent large quakes.