Local people looking at the site of a landslide in Yambali, Papua New Guinea, in 2024
Xinhua/Alamy
When a dangerous land slide arrives, rescuers rush to help know exactly where to look, and now a new technique to analyze seismic data can do exactly that, tracking the disaster source a few kilometers in a few seconds.
Existing methods can only reduce locations to dozens of kilometers, says Stefania Ursica in the Helmholtz center for geosciences in Germany. In remote areas, this can lead to delays if rescuers are sent to the wrong place. “That loss of time can be crucial,” Ursica said at a press conference at a meeting of the European Union of Geosciences in Vienna last week.
Many countries have a network of seismic monitors to record the activity related to earthquakes and volcanoes. These data can also be used to detect events such as kicks, whose risk increases due to climate change, but data of this type of event are much more messy and difficult to analysis than earthquakes, says Urica.
There are two novel aspects in her team’s approach, she says. The first is an analysis of five different aspects of the seismic waveform to choose the noise exactly when an event occurred.
This information feeds on a more or less mathematical agents who seek the location of the event, such as the initial rock drop that leads to landslide. They do it by estimating what waveform the leg would have produced if the event had happened in a particular place and comparing it to the registered waveform. If it does not match, they try a different place.
Each agent “moves” in a pattern inspired by the behavior of animals, from the spiral of a hawk to the long elephant migrations, until they are collectively in the most likely place of the event. The whole process takes only around 10 seconds and is much more precise than the previous approaches. “We basically have an order of magnitude [of] Improvement, “says Ursica.
In addition to helping rescue efforts, it will help researchers locate events in remote areas where satellite data are not clear or not unmissable, it says: “We can be events that we get that we get that we could not see.”
The equipment plans to publish the details soon and make the code available for the use of others.
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