Its 2013 - Time to get back out in the field

This week Lara (GeoNet Network Operations and Development Manager) and i came down to Canterbury to collect four temporary seismic sites from Mt Hutt Station, and scope around for new test areas for permanent sites.  We aim to put out 5/6 sites to test for two different potential stations, this depends on time/weather etc.


After the Canterbury earthquakes we expanded our seismic network in the immediate area, so these sites are a continuation of that and they will be the southern most new additions for the Canterbury extension.

Below are some are some photos from our trip for your viewing pleasure! You can read one of my more detailed blogs on how we set up our test sites here. 

Day One: Mt Hutt

Loading up the ute in Christchurch

Mt Hutt Station

Our first site to collect at Mt Hutt Station

 Day two: Arundel  <- click to find out where this is (and no,  its not Middle Earth)

Lara digging at our First site

All finished!

Second site finished with a thunderstorm in the background

The cows were really keen

And then the storm got us

Hail = ouch!

Murphy the farmers dog didn't like the thunder and caught

 a ride home with us

 

Tomorrow we are out and about in Timaru - fingers crossed for nice weather!

The End is Nigh...

And many people are beginning to wind down for the year, and some have finished already.

Although many of us will be out of the office, GeoNet is 24/7 so we will have people monitoring earthquakes, volcanoes and landslides etc throughout the holidays. Social media will also be taken care of as some of us *cough* can't stay off our phones!

So although we have fingers and toes crossed for a geologically/hazardy uneventful holiday break, if anything does decide to play up don't worry, we will be onto it.

All news and Volcano Alert Bulletins etc. will still be posted here

And if you ever have trouble finding any news stories, or data try the search box (see -->)

So HAPPY HOLIDAYS! (And here is a little festive Simons Cat for your Friday amusement)

Volcanoes, Eruptions, Oh My!

Well the second half of 2012 has been all about the volcanoes! Tongariro and White Island in August then maybe Ruapehu, but no Tongariro again!

So firstly some important information on what to do during during an ash fall event and lava flows and general information for before/during/after an eruption from CDEM.

Where to find information on our website:

Current status of the volcanoes, drums and cameras here
News and Volcanic Alert Buletins here
More information and history on Tongariro here and our other volcanoes here

What do the alerts mean?

So what does this mean?

Unfortunately we don't know what will happen in the days to come. As far as eruptions go this was just a small one, only lasting five minutes. And there were no signs that Tongariro was going to erupt again today, volcanoes can be sneaky like that!

We do have lots of seismic sensors on and around the volcanoes and cameras watching the mountains as well as a great team of experts currently looking at all of the data coming in! So we will be closely monitoring the volcanoes and putting out bulletins as more information comes in.

View from Te Maari Crater shortly after the eruption.

Lots of earthquakes - What does this mean?

Another comment we often see is "there have been xx earthquakes today, what does this mean"

We it means that we are living in a really interesting place! New Zealand is located on the boundary of two of the world’s major tectonic plates – the Pacific Plate and the Australian Plate. Below is a video explaining how this plate boundary creates earthquakes in NZ.

Another thing to remember with our new website is that we are showing you all of the earthquakes that we locate, the old website just had the larger/felt events.  And we locate over 20,000 earthquakes a year!

As you can see in the picture below, the earthquakes occur along the plate boundary in both the North and South Islands. The shallow earthquakes (under 40km deep) occur across quite a wide area (pink - red dots) while the deeper quakes (below 40km deep) occur on the sloping surface that shows where the plate boundary dips down at an angle (orange - yellow - blue dots)

All located earthquakes in 2011 (24,000) via QuakeSearch

 

Another cool thing you can see on our new website is a summary of earthquakes in the New Zealand region  here

You can see that as of this morning, we have had 168 earthquakes of mag 2-3 in the last week.

So lots of earthquakes in one area....

Can mean you are having a swarm = a swarm is a sequences of many earthquakes, usually in a short time period (hours to days). These occur all the time in NZ, with Taupo, Rotorua, Matata and Te Aroha being popular locations! 

They are normal processes and can be related to the long term tectonic stretching of the crust that occurs in the central North Island.

More info:

Stats on earthquakes from 1960

 
Neat Diagram of the plates in NZ

Video of the tectonic evolution of NZ

Historical Earthquakes in NZ

Exploring our new website - Pt 1

Our new website went live this week and we hope you are all enjoying it! I thought I'd do a wee series of posts to help you find your way around!

The first important part are the three main places to get your information:

- Quakes: Every earthquake located in New Zealand! Along with seismic drums and statistics.

- Volcano:  Home to cameras, drums and the current status of the volcanoes.

- Info : Which has all of our latest news, hazard info,  maps of our networks, and our raw data.

You can access these different areas by the black bar which is at the top of each page (see pic above)

Quakes

 - When you go to www.geonet.org.nz this is where you will find yourself here (only the last three felt earthquakes are shown so the page loads quickly!)
- Using the navigation bar (circled in the pic on the right) you can select a region and see all of the recent events there and you can choose to see ALL or FELT earthquakes. This is also where you will find the seismic drums.

Volcano

-Here you can select a volcano and see its current alert level, drums and photos from our volcano cameras

 Info

- News: All of our latest news articles, volcano alert bulletins, and updates
- Data: Where you can access all of our raw data, and find quakes via QuakeSearch
- Networks: View maps of all of our networks across NZ, individual site information and information on the equipment we use
- Geohazards: This is where you will find info on earthquake, volcano, tusnami and landslides

Some tips

See a question mark ? -  hover your mouse over it and get more info

See a link with a information i sign next to it - this link will take you to the Info part of our website

Looking around info - check out the page 'tree' on the left hand side for more pages to look at

Click on Maps for a cool interactive time-map

And finally, we are still tweaking a few things, and more features will be added in the near future!

Changes to our Twitter feeds & Facebook

From Wednesday our new website is officially live, along with Rapid earthquake notifications so our twitter-feeds will change a wee bit:

TWITTER

• @geonet  will get all of the felt earthquakes
• @geonet_all  will get all located earthquakes
• @geonet_above4 & @geonet_above5 will both stay the same (with rapid info)
•  @geonet_felt  will not be used anymore

FACEBOOK 

• Will be using @geonet so will be posting all the felt events onto the Facebook page

More info on the website changes here:

http://geonet-shakennotstirred.blogspot.co.nz/2012/08/geonetorgnz-change-is-coming.html

http://geonet-shakennotstirred.blogspot.co.nz/2012/08/more-change-earthquake-notifications.html

More Change : Earthquake notifications

Continuing on from my last post on the upcoming changes to www.geonet.org.nz, the move from human to automated earthquake location is bringing you faster information but it also means a few things will have to change.

At the moment when an earthquake is located the information is posted onto the website and then sent out to emails / twitter/ facebook etc. and this can take up to 20min.

Now SeisComP3 has an initial quake location out within a few minutes of an event, this then gets revised as more data comes in. So this is where the change comes in!

We will now be able to give you event information a lot quicker than before, but due to the 'history' of the quake and the slight change in size / location when more data comes in, the format will change.

Our GeoNet Rapid feed on Twitter has already been using this format for a while, see the pic on the right.

So you see, you will have to click the link to get all of the quake details and the final location. But you will be able to see, within a few minutes, that there was a event of xx intensity in xx area. (reminder on intensity at the bottom of the page)

From early September you will see these changes on Twitter, Facebook and emails as well as on the website.
Frequent users of GeoNet Rapid and those of you with our android /iPhone apps will be more familiar with this.

We do understand this will take a wee bit of getting used to, but you will be getting information faster than ever before!