Out and about - Southland, and learning NZ Geography

Two of our team (Sam & Lara) are currently down in Southland fixing a few pieces of our equipment. So i got them to send me a few pics so we could follow their adventures.


The pic on the left is WHZ (Weather Hill Road) the site has had an impaired signal lately and they think the trees could be the culprit!

Leaving Manapouri for DCZ

 The next stop was via helicopter to the remote DCZ (Deep Cove) site, where the satellite modem was faulty and affecting the comms. So they swapped it out.


And some locals came to see what was going on ...

 Cheeky Kea

 And here is Sam working out the gear while they wait for the helicopter to take them to Wednesday peak. 










Another thing that earthquakes have done recently, is teach us  places in New Zealand that we haven't heard of before! The team were kind enough to stop and take a photo of the Tuatapere sign for me!

I first heard of the town Tuatapere back in 2009 after the Dusky Sound earthquake where the location came through as "100 km north-west of Tuatapere" and left a few of us wondering where on earth is that ( i remember texting Lara)!!  A few years down the track and a few more shakes off the South Island have made the town quite well known.

They drove through Nightcaps and Ohai to get there too.

Snow season - watch out for volcanoes!

Winter has come, the snow has fallen and people are heading up to Mt Ruapehu for some fun. Now while this is great, and so pretty (this pic is from our webcam this morning) its also important to remember underneath all of that white stuff is an active volcano!

Now I'm not wanting to put you off going up there - its just like all of the hazards in NZ - just do a little research and be prepared!

One of the major hazards on the mountain in an eruption is a lahar = a  "mudflow" - a mixture of 

volcanic ash, rocks and water.

The last eruption on Mt Ruapehu was in September 2007, during this eruption explosions spread ash, rocks and water across the summit area, producing lahars in two valleys including one in the Whakapapa ski field.  In March 2007 the dam at the crater lake failed and produced a really big lahar :

If a volcanic eruption does occur at on the mountain an audio siren and message will sound from a series of speakers located around the ski area, immediately move to higher ground and out of valleys. Stay in a safe zone until you receive further instructions from Ruapehu staff.

Mt Ruapehu, the Department of Conservation and GNS Science have all worked together to produce volcanic hazard maps of Ruapehu and Whakapapa and Turoa ski areas:

Ruapehu Hazards poster

Whakapapa hazards poster

Turoa hazards poster

So check them out before you head up the mountain!

Mt Ruapehu 1996

GeoNet monitors Mt Ruapehu (along with other volcanoes in NZ) with 3 web cameras, 10 seismographs and 6 microphones to detect volcanic explosions, frequent water chemistry and airborne gas measurements, and 8 continuous GPS stations to detect ground deformation.

For more info on Mt Ruapehu click here and info on the other volcanoes we monitor here.  

Mt Ruapheu website

The Popular Ones

After reading online today that Google had released its stats for the month of May i had a wee look at how 'popular' GeoNet was!

And we made it in the top 10 rising searches in NZ!  GeoNet came in 9th with 60% growth in searches - maths, All Blacks, American idol, the GC, Facebook and Diablo were all ahead of us (Maths, really??)

Using 'Google Trends' we can look into this further:

In the pic below you can see that searches for our new website GeoNet Rapid have increased by 250% which is great! 

 It also tells us other websites people have looked at after visiting GeoNet which is (kind of creepy) really interesting! If you look below you can see that people who visited geonet.org.nz also visited some websites which were related eg. CERA, the Christchurch City Council. But the more interesting sites were lotto and holiday houses - now whats that saying!

Twitter also gives lists of the most popular accounts GeoNet is number 41 in the top 100 followed in the Wellington region (it only gave Wellington or Auckland)

And on Facebook our page received 315 new likes in May.

So thanks to everyone, you make us feel special!

GeoNet Rapid - Why is it different?

GeoNet Rapid has been up and running for a few months now so i thought i would go over a few things, the first is:

Quake history:

SeisComP3 is fast as it locates the earthquakes automatically (no humans needed).  As soon as it has enough data it is able to post a first location on GeoNet rapid, if you look at the pic above you can see the first location was posted 42seconds after the actual earthquake. 

As more data arrives, from more distant stations, the system refines the location (up to 4 minutes in the pic above)  and finally finishes when the last data has arrived (10min on the pic). This delay is caused by the time it takes from the earthquake P wave to travel to the stations - eg if there was an earthquake at Stewart Island, it would take around seven minutes for the earthquake wave to travel and be picked up by our sensors at Cape Reinga (top of the North Island). The very last change comes later on when one of our duty seismologists looks at the event.

Status/ quality:

As the event changes you will notice both the 'status' and 'quality' change along with it.  The status lets you know if the solution has been located 'automatically' or 'reviewed' by a human   - see figure B in the pic below.  the Quality changes as more information comes into the system - with few stations the solution has 'caution', many stations has 'good' and finally 'best' when a human has reviewed it - see figure A in the pic below.

Descriptions found by hovering over the ? on the website.

We have also added a keyword / colour coding system to the earthquake intensity so you can easily tell if an earthquake was damaging or unnoticeable - see figure C in the pic above.

So why is it different to www.geonet.org.nz?

 

Yes the earthquake locations on GeoNet Rapid will be slightly different to those on www.geonet.org.nz The main reason for this is that SeisComP3 uses a three dimensional velocity model, whereas www.geonet.org.nz uses a one dimensional model.

The three dimensional data model uses a lot of data collected by the GeoNet project as well as many other research projects in NZ. By using this model we are really improving the way we located earthquakes.

 Next....

GeoNet Rapid will be in full production by late September 2012, and will bring with it a whole new look to the GeoNet website and information, some exciting things to come!

PS: The official GeoNet app for your smartphones can be downloaded here for  Android  and the iPhone/Pad app will be available next month! Is available now! 
  

Have an iPhone or iPad?

Well the GeoNet app is nearly ready, and here is a sneak peak.




The app can be in your hot hands next month!

Myth Busting!

Over my time here at GeoNet there have been various hazards come and go, and with them come the various myths/legends and some weird theories.

So I've decided to do a 'Monday Myth Buster' series on our  Facebook and Twitter pages, to clarify some of these up, and you might get a laugh or two out of them!

Today we start with 'Earthquake Weather'. Now this belief dates back to the 4th Century where the famous Greek Aristotle said that earthquakes were caused by winds trapped in underground caves. Small quakes were thought to have been caused by air pushing on the cave roofs, and large ones by the air breaking the surface. This led to the belief in earthquake weather, if  a large amount of air was trapped underground, the weather would be hot and calm before an earthquake

As cool as this theory sounds, its just isn't true.  Earthquakes begin below the grounds surface, where the weather is too far away to have any effect. And statistics have shown that earthquakes occur in about the same numbers in wet / dry / cold and hot conditions.

Out in the field - Christchurch

Christchurch cityscape

On Thursday i traveled down to Christchurch to help one of our Scientists Lara put out some new seismic test sites in Canterbury,  as she was the 'boss' of the trip i took on the role of navigator and hole digger!

We put out three test sites in total, they will stay in place for a month and then we come back and pack them up. Back at GeoNet HQ the team then look at the all of the data the sites collected, if  they test well (the signals are clear with no noise eg. farm activity) we will potentially build permanent stations there to help us better locate the earthquakes in the Canterbury area. 

All three sites were in the Rakaia district and all on dairy farms so we saw lots of cows (our poor rental ute was a bit messy too!)  The first  test site was in a nice dry grass paddock - so digging the hole for the sensor was 'fun'. It takes about 45min to put out a test site, as long as everything goes to plan - with this site we had a slight issue with the case that houses the data-logger above ground - being good kiwis however, it was nothing that we couldn't fix with a bit of duct-tape!

Rakaia 1

Rakaia 2

We have to dig a small hole at each test site to house to seismometer. The second site  had the added bonus of stony soil - even more fun for digging!  The photo below shows the finished product with the equipment wrapped up in a tarp to protect from the weather, and the electric fence to keep the nosy cows out.
 





 The photo below is of the final site of the day, although it looks like she is in the middle of cake baking, here Lara is mixing up the ready-set concrete to go into the hole. A concrete paver is carefully placed (and leveled) onto the concrete and its on top of this that the seismometer sits.

Rakaia 3

 On the second day we traveled out to Mount Pleasant here  as we would like to install a new strong motion sensor. These measure the very strong shaking associated with damaging earthquakes and are located in towns or near faults and are usually installed inside buildings.








We found a suitable area down a small terrace and a homeowner kindly let us have a look at his garage which would be a suitable place (they generally need to be on rock or concrete and have a power source). Although there were about eight houses down this particular terrace, one has been demolished and only two are now inhabited since the earthquakes - and the damage is quite obvious as you can see with the shed above.

Stickers on a property

Its strange how you can travel around some parts of Canterbury and even Christchurch and its hard to tell the earthquakes ever happened, and then you can go to certain areas and its very clear!  As we were traveling out to the airport we drove past buildings in various states of demolition, and empty lots where this has already occurred, at the same time there are little signs of hope and resilience - the church below had a cute picture painted on it with 'I'll kiss it better"

A church being demolished in the cbd.