Want to know what our scientists are busy doing when an earthquake happens? Get a behind-the-scenes look inside operations of the National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC) here:
Seismologists at the National Earthquake Information Centre are on duty 24/7 to monitor quake activity.At 17 minutes past midnight on Saturday 25 April, Rob Sanders's computer started chiming with alerts.
Computer monitors have replaced the slowly rotating paper drums that once displayed the vibrations measured at seismic stations around the world. But the centre has kept one relic on display: a large wooden globe that often appeared in television reports. Patches of its coloured surface are worn away from decades of seismologists jabbing their fingers at earthquake locations. Southern California has basically disappeared. So has Japan.
Within 16 seconds they reached Kathmandu, almost 80 kilometres to the southeast, and began toppling thousands of buildings. Just over a minute later they passed Lhasa, 600 kilometres northeast of the epicentre, and shook seismometers bolted into granite in a hillside tunnel. Those machines, part of the Global Seismographic Network, immediately relayed their data to the NEIC.
From his home, Hayes ran a separate set of model calculations, which use data on longer-period seismic waves that arrive at stations later but are more appropriate for the world's largest quakes. At 1:04 a.m., on the basis of this 'W-phase' analysis, the NEIC updated the Nepal quake's magnitude to 7.9.Credit: Barry Gutierrez
As the minutes crept by, aftershocks kept pummelling Kathmandu. PAGER automatically updated three more times at the orange level, the last at 2:16 a.m.. Then Wald took some data on how much the ground had moved and how widespread the aftershocks were, and manually fed the fresh information into PAGER. The alert immediately escalated to red, estimating between 1,000 and 10,000 deaths. It was 4:14 a.m..In Washington DC, Gari Mayberry's mobile phone woke her up with the first NEIC alert.
The most recent estimates suggest that the 25 April earthquake and its aftershocks, including a magnitude 7.3 on 12 May, killed roughly 8,700 people — close to the PAGER estimates of around 10,000 deaths. Other catastrophe experts had estimated 50,000 dead or more, using independent assessments of population exposure and building vulnerability.
Cutting back on false alerts while making sure that the real ones get out in time takes a nuanced mix of skill and speed. The NEIC gets data from nearly 1,800 stations worldwide, but there are gaps that slow the seismic analyses. China's national seismological alerting network puts a 30-minute delay on much of the information, so Earle's team can rarely use it. And India does not release its seismic data.
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