Amazing collaboration between “Go Blue” and “Go Green” teams!
During the long geological history, faults are formed ubiquitously in the earth crust, including Michigan and Ohio. Though most of the times these faults are quietly buried underground, they may host earthquakes occasionally. Our LEEP project (Lake Erie Earthquake exPeriment) is motivated by the observation of small earthquakes around the area. We (Yihe Huang@UMich, Songqiao Shawn Wei@Michigan State, and Wenyuan Fan@UC Scripps) would like to know whether these earthquakes are triggered by the loading of lake water. If so, how large can the earthquakes be in future? This requires us to deploy seismometers to record earthquake signals.
Like music is better recorded in quiet rooms, earthquakes can be better detected by seismometers in quiet areas such as farms. However, it’s not easy to collect the contact information of farms near Lake Erie. We worked with Michigan Centennial Farm Association (MCFA) who has helped us tremendously and provided a list of 35 farms within 5 miles of the shoreline, which is exactly what we need to start the deployment project! Our students were so excited to have this information and reached out to farms on the list. In the end, eight seismometers have been put in farms within ~5 miles from the lake shoreline between October, 2018 and July, 2021. During this period, student Prithvi Thakur and postdoc Dongdong Yao have managed a data service trip every ~3 months. This project could not happen without the support of our students and postdocs (Emily Boswell, Sydney Gable, Samuel Haugland, Olivia Helprin, Seoyoung Kim, Jamie Lackner, Sophie Lin, Meichen Liu, Yaolin Miao, Jing Ci Neo, Prithvi Thakur, and Dongdong Yao) and staff (Craig Delap, Paula Frank, Anne Hudon, and Owen Neil). Special thanks to the PASSCAL people (Noel Barstow, Greg Chavez, Pnina Miller, Jodie Owen, and Holly Rotman) who offered great help and fantastic support on this project! Hopefully we’ll know soon what caused these small earthquakes and how they may impact the residents around Lake Erie. Attached are field photos taken during the deployment, and here is a video shot during the station removal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Fb89TpUfBA!
