Citizen Science Data Helps to Unearth Seismic Noise Reduction from COVID-19 Posted on : Aug 04 - 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an enormous chilling effect on global society. For months, everything from shopping to traffic slowed around the world, and people even began noticing measurable changes in wildlife populations and pollution levels. Now, data from a citizen science project is helping researchers examine another aspect of COVID-19’s planetary quieting: seismic noise.

Seismic noise is the passive, constant hum in the ground produced by human activity on Earth – traffic, transit, walking, construction, and so on. For months, several hundred seismic stations across 78 countries have been carefully monitoring this seismic noise as the pandemic swept across the globe.

These seismic stations included 65 Raspberry Shake seismographs: devices built on top of single-board Raspberry Pi computers and designed to monitor seismic activity at home or in the classroom. Raspberry Shake claims that these citizen science devices constitute the “largest singular network of real-time seismographs in the world” (to see a map of those citizen seismographs, click here).

Lead author Thomas Lecocq of the Royal Observatory of Belgium organized an academic collaboration involving 76 authors from 66 institutions and 27 countries to sort through the many terabytes of data produced by these seismographs. The authors were able to pin down the startling scale of the change: the lockdowns had reduced seismic noise by 50% worldwide, despite no statistical change in the amount of non-anthropogenic seismic activity. View More