Infrasound offer a unique opportunity to look into the subsurface for both seismic sources and seismic velocities. However, one question remaining is to understand how much information about the source is actually contained in acoustic data. Yet, the lack of high quality epincetral infrasound data makes this excercise challenging. Fortunately, a large minequake, that occured in Northern Sweden, was recorded in 2020 by both regional seismic stations and a local infrasound station. This give us a unique opportunity to investigate links between source information in both seismic and acoustic data.
We just published a paper in Geophysical Research Letters to investigate this new dataset and address the question of source-infrasound data correlations:
The largest mining‐induced earthquake in Scandinavia (ML 4.1)occurred on 18 May 2020 early in the morning at the LKAB underground iron ore mine in Kiruna, Sweden. Theseismic waves coupled to the atmosphere and propagated large distances as sound waves which were observedat three infrasound arrays at 9.3 (KRIS, Sweden), 155 (IS37, Norway), and 286 km (ARCI, Norway) distance.Our seismic and acoustic modeling results highlight a strong collapse event within the northern section of themine. The modeling of acoustic and seismic waves across the Earth‐atmosphere suggests that sound wave datacan help when determining the location and properties of a seismic source.
(Turquet et al., 2024)
- Turquet, A., Brissaud, Q., Alvizuri, C., Näsholm, S. P., Le Pichon, A., & Kero, J. (2024). Retrieving seismic source characteristics using seismic and infrasound data: The 2020 ML 4.1 Kiruna minequake, Sweden. Geophysical Research Letters, 51(12), e2024GL109276. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GL109276