Analogue Seismogram Digitization: High School Project Point of Contact: Miaki Ishii

The first observation of a far-away earthquake (i.e., not felt by people) was in 1889. A seismograph in Potsdam recorded seismic wave arrivals of an earthquake in Japan. Until late 1980s, such ground motions were recorded by analogue seismographs, most of which are paper. These recordings spanning about 100 years provide information about earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, climate change, etc. that cannot be analyzed in their analogue form. Furthermore, deterioration of paper accelerates with time and there are often issues of storage space.

The amount of analogue seismograms available around the world is vast. Just at the Harvard University, with single-station operation over about 20 years and with some data that were discarded at the time of operation, there are about 12,000 seismograms. These enormous amount of recordings need to be converted into research-quality digital time series for modern and exciting analyses. In collaboration with Mr. Toshihiro Morinaga of the School Innovation Forum, we have began a project in July of 2018 to involve Japanese high-school students in the digitization process. They will be using the software DigitSeis to generate digital time series from scanned images of seismograms, and will learn about seismology and earth science in general through various learning and interaction opportunities.

Participating Schools (As of July 2018)

• Kyoto Prefectural Momoyama Senior High School (Mr. Toshitada Hata)　  Science Club     Mr. Tamotsu Murayama and
  19 studentsstudent names

Acknowledgements

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