The Sound of Seismic - Reno/Tahoe Airport Microtremor

John N. Louie, 3 July 2001


The Sound of Seismic -- J. Louie's Research and Teaching -- Nevada Seismological Lab
In 1997 J. Louie began to record ambient ground noise with seismic arrays. He made these recordings at the corner of Rock Blvd. and Mill St. in Reno, near the north end of the Reno/Tahoe Airport. Louie developed a method to analyze such records for the phase velocities of Rayleigh waves and estimate shear-wave velocities in densly urban areas. This development has been described in a scientific paper published in 2001.

These recordings, as shown in the plot below, used arrays of 24 sensors spread over an aperture of 360 meters. For the sound version, just one geophone sensor plays into the left ear, and another 200 meters away plays into the right ear. You hear a pronounced stereo effect as if your ears were 200 meters apart.

The sound file loops through seven such stereo records, sped up by a factor of 10 so you hear a new record every 3.2 seconds. There are brief silences inserted between the records. In the early records you can hear traffic, passing from on ear to another; one record (plotted below) has a car and a heavy truck passing in opposite directions. The later records also have a rushing sound from a jet airliner takeoff.

MP3 file (359 kb) Seven 3.2-second segments of microtremor
Time increases toward the right in these plots:

The Sound of Seismic -- J. Louie's Research and Teaching -- Nevada Seismological Lab