We are very proud to announce that our team now includes Dan Hikuroa from Nga Pae o te Maramatanga, New Zealand’s Indigenous Centre of Research Excellence. There are several projects around the globe that do seismology in schools, but to celebrate New Zealand’s unique cultural heritage and its natural expressions such as earthquakes and volcanoes, we decided to name our network “Ru”, short for Ruaumoko, The Maori God of Earthquakes and Volcanoes.

Mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) – produced over a time span of 1000 years, offers the longest record of New Zealand earthquakes available.

The name Rū is the Māori word for earthquakes, itself derived from Rūaumoko the deity of earthquakes (also known as Whakaruaimoko, Rūamoko, Rūaimoko, Whakarūamoko, Rūaimokoroa).

In Māori tradition, earthquakes are caused by Rūaumoko, the son of Ranginui (the Sky-father) and his wife Papatūānuku (the Earth-mother). Rangi had been separated from Papa by one of their sons Tānenuiarangi, and because they pined for one another so much, producing clouds, rain, mist, frost and snow, their sons resolved to turn their mother face downwards, away from Rangi towards Rarohenga, the underworld. When Papatūānuku was turned over Rūaumoko was still at her breast and was carried to the world below where he was given fire – te ahi komau to provide warmth and comfort for his mother. To avenge the ill-treatment of his parents, Rūaumoko constantly battles humankind, physically manifested by earthquakes and volcanoes. Although a geological interpretation of the ultimate explanations of why we experience earthquakes and volcanoes differs fundamentally from that given above, some interesting commonalities exist, most notably that earthquakes and volcanoes are caused by the same processes – heat causing earthquakes and volcanoes.

More often than not, the screen of your seismic stations may look something like this:

Overall, the wiggles are small. The few spikes in this case are probably due to some electronic interference in the area where station AUCK is housed.

BUT: If you see something on your seismometer screen that stands out from the rest of your recordings, like this:

Then, there are a number of things you can check to see if you recorded an earthquake (or if this was some noise generated by bumping into the sensor, for example).

Geonet

Geonet is “the official source of geological hazard information for New Zealand,” according to the site.  They run a large network of seismometers in New Zealand, whose data is the source of information about all recorded earthquakes in New Zealand. Can you find an earthquake that would arrive at your school at the time of your signal?

USGS

The United States Geological Survey runs a world-wide version of Geonet. Its list of recent earthquakes can be found here.

If you want to get updates via email, text message or twitter, you can sign up for alerts from Geonet and from the USGS.

Your sister institutions

You can also directly compare the wiggles on your screen with either the wiggles from the other schools in the network, or with the closest “live” signals that geonet provides.  In this last link is a map on the right where you can find the station that is closest to your school.

createkml.py

A python script that creates a kml representation of earthquake data.

createkml.py expects a path to a csv file of the form created by the Geonet csv export call.

The implementation I use to do this reads the file downloaded by a bash script (running as a cron job)

The essential part of this is

wget -O /PATH/TO/FILE.csv "http://wfs.geonet.org.nz/geonet/ows?service=WFS&version=1.0.0&request=GetFeature&typeName=geonet:quake_search_v1&maxFeatures=50&outputFormat=csv"

The format of the file has the following columns, we are only interested in a few of them (in bold)

FID,
publicid,
eventtype,
origintime,
modificationtime,
latitude,
longitude,
depth,
magnitude,
evaluationmethod,
evaluationstatus,
evaluationmode,
earthmodel,
depthtype,
originerror,
usedphasecount,
usedstationcount,
minimumdistance,
azimuthalgap,
magnitudetype,
magnitudeuncertainty,
magnitudestationcount,
origin_geom

See http://info.geonet.org.nz/

The code

Basic stuff, no data integrity checking (this is part of a pipeline in the local implementation).

#!/usr/bin/python

import argparse
import StringIO
import csv
import datetime
import dateutil.parser
import math

#  build the parser
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='Plot earthquakes on a map')
parser.add_argument('filename', help='path/to/csv file')
args = parser.parse_args()

#  open the file provided
f = open(args.filename, 'r')

#  read it in, and create the basic data we will
#  be using
output = StringIO.StringIO(f.read())

#  import in csv file format
data = csv.reader(output)

#   drop the first line
data.next()

#  print out the top of the file
print '<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?-->\n\n'
print '\tRecent earthquakes in and around New Zealand'
print '\tSource: GeoNet (www.geonet.org.nz); Created: {}'.format(repr(datetime.datetime.now().isoformat()))

# get the time right noe (UTC)
now = datetime.datetime.utcnow()

# maxdepth is the deepest value
# after which all colour values are clamped

maxdepth = 400.0

for row in data:
  # convert the date to something humans understand
  whendatetime = dateutil.parser.parse(row[3])

  # figure out how far to fade the icon
  # clamp this to ~25% minimum
  difference = (now - whendatetime).total_seconds();
  if difference &gt; 86400:
    difference = 86400
  elif difference &lt; 0:
	difference = 0

  # 'shade' is a two character hex value, 3f-ff,
  # used as the alpha value in the colour applied
  # to the icon
  shade = format(255 - int((float(difference)/86400)* 192),'02x')

  # Generate a colour value for the icon
  # associated with depth.
  # The color ramp will be a logarithmic
  # progression from 00ff00 (shallow)
  # to 0000ff (deep), maxed at maxdepth km?
  depth = float(row[7])

  # fast at shallow, slow at depth
  # multiplier = 255/sqrt(maxdepth)
  # depth2 = math.sqrt(depth)*(255/math.sqrt(maxdepth))

  # slow at shallow, fast at depth
  # divisor = maxdepth/sqrt(255)
  # depth2 = (depth/(maxdepth/math.sqrt(255)))**2

  # flat
  # multiplier = maxdepth/255
  depth2 = depth*(255/maxdepth)

  if depth2 &gt; 255:
    depth2 = 255.0
  elif depth2 &lt; 0:
    depth2 = 0.0
  if depth2 &lt; 128:
    green = 'ff'
    red = format(int(depth2*2),'02x')
  else:
    green = format(255-int((depth2-128)*2),'02x')
    red = 'ff'

  # round magnitude to determine the icon style
  magnitude = float(row[8]);
  magnitudelow = int(math.floor(magnitude))
  if magnitudelow &gt; 9:
    magnitudelow = 9
  elif magnitudelow &lt; 0:
    magnitudelow = 0

  description = '<![CDATA[\n
<div style="text-align: left;">'
  description += '<a href="http://www.geonet.org.nz/quakes/region/newzealand/' + row[1] + '" target="' + row[1] + '"><b>' + row[1] + '</b></a>'
  description += '\n
<b>' + whendatetime.strftime('%H:%M, %d %B %Y') + '</b> (UTC)'
  description += '\n
magnitude: <b>' + str(round(float(row[8]),2)) + '</b>'
  description += '\n
depth: <b>' + str(round(float(row[7]),2)) + 'km</b>'
  description += '</div>
]]>'

  print '\t'
  print '\t\t' + description + ''
  print '\t\t' print '\t\t\n\t\t\t' + row[6] + ',' + row[5] + ',0' print '\t\t\n\t' # print out the bottom of the file print '\n\n'

The script dumps its output to standard output, so I generally redirect this to a file.

There are three magnets suspended from the slinky in the TC1. The first two are centred in the coil. Motion of these magnets from earthquakes are responsible for the induced current in the coil. The third magnet is suspended in the copper tube,  and dampens the system via Lenz’s Law.

The pair of magnets in the coil, and the single magnet in the copper pipe should not touch the coil and tube, respectively, and their tops should be flush with the coil/tube, as shown in the picture.

If the magnets are not in the right vertical position, you can adjust the magnets by threading the screw on the lid up or down. If you need even more vertical adjustment, you can bunch or release rungs clamped in the lid of TC1.

If the magnets are not in the right horizontal position, adjust the knobs on the legs.

If the screenshot of your station is not updating here, consider the following:

1. Is your computer still on? In principle, it can’t be off is power is available: the bios should be set that the machine comes on after a power failure.
2. Is your computer on the network? For macs, you can troubleshoot a wireless connection here, or trouble shoot in general from System Preferences > Network > Assist Me > Diagnostics.
3. Is Jamaseis still running? Jamaseis should be in your startup menu, so that if the computer comes (back) on, so does jamaseis.

If the answer to the three questions is “yes”, check your log file (under the window menu in jamaseis). If you see an error that you can fix, great. If not, send us the log file and restart jamaseis.

Is the TC1 set up right?

If you are unsure if the TC1 is balanced and set up correctly, visit this post

The last 50 earthquakes in and around New Zealand

(regenerated from the data every 10 minutes or so)