This is a short excerpt from What On Earth?
This is a guide to how earth science works, because many parts of earth science leave lay people asking questions like How can we know what a once in a thousand years flood looks like.
Actually, I have already covered that one, and I used part of that blog entry in What on Earth?
There is a seismometer in Spain which has often detected odd things. It is 500 metres away from the Camp Nou stadium in Barcelona, in the basement of the Institute of Earth Sciences Jaume Almera of the CSIC (in Spain, it is called ICTJA-CSIC).
In May 2016, Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band
held a concert at Camp Nou. When 65,000 spectators danced to their songs,
researcher Jordi Diaz found that the seismometer recorded the vibrations caused
as the crowd jumped together. Here is the seismic record of the Springsteen
concert:
The graph that appears below this shows the seismometer readings during
Springsteen’s performance. Can you work out when he went from one song to the
next?
At other times, the same seismometer has detected underground trains, traffic patterns (including the rush hour in Barcelona) and nearby fireworks, but the best of all was when the instrument detected Catalan enthusiasm at a football game in May 2015. The football club FC Barcelona, whose home ground is the Camp Nou stadium scored three goals in the last 15 minutes of a Champions League semi-finals game against Bayern Munich, and the fans’ celebrations showed up clearly.
This story was republished with the assistance and
permission of Jordi Diaz and ICTJA-CSIC.
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