Quake Club picks up Icelandic eruption data!
22/04/2010
View the video to see how the seismometer works!
Learn all about the College's Seismometer with the Mid Sussex Times' article and video, posted to their website this week!
Students based at the Haywards Heath campus have been given the opportunity to join a very exclusive club. 'Quake Club' has recently been launched by Mathematics and Physics teacher, and Geology enthusiast, Deanna Nicholson and Subject Leader for Geography and Geology, Helen Hore, to give students access to the College's fully functional Seismometer, which is able to track seismic activity from across the globe. The project is designed to integrate the learning of science, technology, engineering and maths, in line with the national STEM agenda.
The club, which meets every Thursday, will learn more about the causes and effects of major earthquakes, as well as how to gather readings from the seismometer, and upload the data to the College's page on the School Seismology Project website, which is run by the British Geological Survey. Readings submitted by the College form part of a global monitoring process that could help to accurately locate the position of an earthquake.
Since the Seismometer was installed last August, several strong earthquakes have hit around the world, including a 7.0 in Indonesia, September 2009, the much documented 7.0 quake in Haiti which killed 230,000 people in January, and the massive 8.8 quake in Chile this February, the power of which Seismologists estimate may have shortened the length of the day by 1.26 microseconds and moved the Earth's axis by 8cm! At Quake Club, students learn how to set up and alighn the seismoneter as well as how it actually works. After an earthquake they are able to extract the trace files, then use these to find out how far away from the epicenter we are and calculate the size of the earthquake. Students can also learn about the factors which cause an earthquake to be a major humanitarian disaster, such as the Haiti quake, and about how the people of Chile managed to escape with a relatively low loss of life, despite being hit by one of the largest earthquakes on record. The Chile quake, incidently, triggered a reading which was off the scale of the College's Seismometer!
After the starting 'Quake Club' in March, teacher Deanna Nicholson explained why it is important for increasing an understanding of how geology, science and maths work together in the real world outside the classroom, saying "From simple physics, that we cover in the second year, we are able to detect movements of the earth
due to events thousands of miles away. We use geology and maths to analyse the data, demonstrating a practical use of the skills the students are developing in class."
