Last week, Temple’s Department of Earth and Environmental Science installed a broadband seismometer on the Ambler Campus to monitor seismic activity along the East Coast of the United States.

The seismometer, which was purchased by the College of Science and Technology and looks like a miniature R2-D2 from Star Wars, was installed in the wooded area east of the Loop Road, behind the student resident parking area.

“Although Pennsylvania is located far from active tectonic plate boundaries responsible for large earthquakes such as the recent disaster in Haiti, the state has experienced shocks in the past large enough to rattle dishes, knock bricks from chimneys and even split walls,” said Jonathan Nyquist, the Weeks Chair in Environmental Geology at Temple, who coordinated the project for the university. “Because of budget constraints, seismic monitoring has focused on high-risk western states such as California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska, with far fewer seismometers deployed along the East Coast.”

Scientists from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University oversaw the preparation of the site and the installation.  Temple now joins the Lamont-Doherty Cooperative Seismographic Network, which monitors seismic activity along the East Coast.  Data from the seismometer will be automatically transmitted to a computer in the Amber Technology Center, and seismographs will then be posted in real-time on the Lamont-Doherty seismic website.

The addition of the Temple seismometer near Philadelphia fills a gap in our region's earthquake monitoring network and will help researchers to understand the forces that create rare but potentially destructive intra-plate earthquakes.