Earthquake Precursors (patent pending)
An Example of Data Acquisition and Processing at Science Horizons
The elusiveness of earthquake precursors is responsible for the seismic community's failure to predict earthquakes. It occurred to us that seismic arrays might be the answer to this problem. The U.S. Patent Office has granted patents that protect Science Horizons' use of seismic array technology for identifying earthquake precursors.
Here we will evaluate Science Horizons' patents involving the use of seismic array technology to identify earthquake precursors. We want to demonstrate how Science Horizons' data acquisition and processing products will be utilized to conduct this evaluation. These commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products are The AQUINAS System, The Portable AQUINAS System (PAS), and SeismicRadar.
The earthquake data used to search for precursors was generated on September 10, 2006, by a magnitude 6.0 earthquake with epicenter in the Gulf of Mexico, and on September 28, 2004, by another magnitude 6.0 earthquake with epicenter located near Parkfield, CA on the San Andreas fault.
Precursors prior to the Gulf of Mexico earthquake
The earthquake was located 617 kilometers from Melbourne, Florida, and was felt by most of the residents of the Melbourne area. Science Horizons had a PAS operational in its Melbourne technical facility. The PAS consisted of its standard data acquisition equipment and a three component seismometer. The PAS not only recorded the earthquake itself, but also an event that preceeded the earthquake.
Since the PAS at Melbourne received data only from a single recording site, it was not possible to determine if the "precursor" was related to the earthquake. In order to solve this issue, we required data from a seismic array, specifically, data from a Science Horizons AQUINAS System. Data of that quality, recorded at 40 sps, was available from the TXAR seismic array in Lajitas, TX:
While analyzing the data, we found the PAS also recorded a possible earthquake precursor that arrived approximately 9 minutes prior to the earthquake's P-wave. The "precursor" and the earthquake data recorded by the PAS are shown here:
