It’s the 50th anniversary of @earthquakes.au and it all started when I was 5 years old with a magnitude 1.4 near my house. How cute was I? Congratulations to everyone who has contributed to the success of the SRC over the decades, and to those taking Australian seismology into the future.

Abstracts are closing in the next 24 hours, so join our “Seismology for All” session to raise awareness for tools and initiatives that might help those getting into our branch of STEM - excuse the unintentional botanical pun 🪾🍃

Have you got something to share with the seismological community about making STEM more accessible? I’ll be talking about how software developed by @earthquakes.au is helping students and early career professionals analyse data. Join this session at the @seismosocam.bsky.social meeting this April.

2025: the year when the first fault rupture was captured on video. Onshore, large, surface rupturing earthquakes are so rare, and to have a camera recording that close to the rupture and framed so well is potentially a once in a lifetime event. Source video is here: youtu.be/77ubC4bcgRM

When I posted a version of this video last year, I underestimated the equivalent energy of a magnitude 9.1 earthquake relative to a nuclear blast by a factor of 10. This time I’ve quantified it using the Trinity test (as seen in the movie Oppenheimer). The 1957 underground test was 10x smaller again

My last trip to Western Australia wasn’t just to collect seismic data, but also involved setting up magnetotelluric stations and deploying networks of nodes to characterise the velocity profile at each site. It was nice to be able to use my drone to get a different perspective of our field work.

Holiday gift idea for the earthquake nerd in your life. We made a few extra SEISMOLOGY MEGAQUAKE t-shirts, and they are on sale at src.com.au. We only have a few left, particularly in the larger sizes, so get in quick. 📦 FREE SHIPPING UNTIL 18 DEC 📦 Add coupon code ROCKMYWORLD in the cart checkout

Faultless earthquakes? Several recent earthquake swarms in southwest Western Australia appear to be volume rupture sequences that don’t appear to occur in a plane to indicate a faulting structure, even after HypoDD reanalysis of 400 aftershocks.

It’s concert season in Melbourne. Last weekend Lady Gaga was rocking Marvel Stadium hard enough to shake our office seismometer 5.6km (3.5mi) away. Here’s the set list order plotted next to frequency and ground motion over time.

Look what a colleague brought back from NZ for me. Aftersocks! I’m intensity 12 🦶

Limited stock and sizes remain, so get in quick if you want a MegaQuake t-shirt. Free shipping deal is on between now and 18 December, so get in early if you want one to arrive in time to put under your tree these holidays.

First hand proof: Lenny Kravitz got Melbourne jumping last night! I correlated my video timing with the seismic recording. He’s so cool, and equally hot. Lenny is all the temperatures.

HypoDD visualisation! Last week I presented a paper on the reanalysis of an aftershock sequence using the double difference method, and used this animation to show how the event locations moved in depth and lat/long with each iteration. About 450 events, with a stable result after only 4 iterations.

I was genuinely surprised at the AEES conference dinner tonight when the committee presented me with lifetime membership to the Society, joining only 5 others given this honour in the Society’s 35 years. I’m scaling back my AEES duties for a few years, but I’ll always be lurking in the background 🤓

AC/DC played Melbourne again on Sunday night. There was a 12% higher peak in ground-pounding tunes compared to last Wednesday. The frequency "heat map" pattern was similar in timing and relative intensity, but slightly clearer this time. 🤘

AC/DC shakes Melbourne! It seems more energy waves went into the air than into the ground, with people reportedly hearing the concert up to 7km (4 miles) away. The ground energy was detected, but not as strongly as during some other recent concerts #ACDC #taylorswift #oasis #travisscott #kiss

Wow, I did not expect my little observation to make its way outside Australia and get picked up by @billboard.com and @rollingstone.com 🤘

We recorded two non-earthquakes in the last 24 hours. The first was on our office seismograph, detecting Oasis fans 5.5km away at Marvel Stadium. The second was picked up by our station in eastern Victoria - likely a sonic boom from a meteor. The sound was reported widely in the region.

Sunrise on our last day in the field. We stayed in Sandstone the next night and visited a rock formation known as London Bridge, as well as the painted tanks that contain the town’s water supply. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for a short video on this trip. Thanks to GSWA for letting us come along.

We had time to stop to take in some sights today, despite the chewed sensor cable at one station near the vermin-proof fence that runs coast-to-coast north-south for thousands of kilometres. Some nights we camp at places we can’t light fires, but ambience is just two plastic buckets and a torch away

We’re camping at seismic stations in a remote section of the network. Flat tyres and camp fires - all part of the fun of field work.

First and only day I’ll be flying. Managed to get to 4 stations, deploy site characterisation nodes at each, and get some drone shots of a magnetotelluric station too.

I’m in Western Australia again, helping with mid-phase data collection from the instruments we deployed 6 months ago. We’re checking solar/battery and logger/sensor performance, and doing a little gardening. A busy 10 days ahead, with site characterisation and magnetotelluric surveys on the cards.

It’s #earthscienceweek so I thought I’d go into a bit more detail on how educators can use to our Quick Quake tool to demonstrate how @earthquakes.au seismologists quickly calculate the location and magnitude of an earthquake. It works on macOS machines with Apple Silicon too.

A magnitude 7.6 earthquake occurred about 10 minutes ago in the Mindanao region of the Philippines, triggering all stations in our southeast Australian network. It’s offshore and around 50km, so hopefully far enough to not cause too much damage or trigger a tsunami.

Here's the @auscope.bsky.social Seismometers in Schools recording this morning's M7.8 Kamchatka earthquake. Data and network visualisation is from SRC's Seismosphere. The 24-hour single station view from Nhulunbuy in the Northern Territory shows the seismometer detecting the earth ringing for hours!

ABC News Breakfast asked me to drop by to comment on this morning's M7.8 earthquake, an aftershock on the M8.8 from late July. I think I'm getting better at explaining crustal stress in plain language, but then I go and call Kamchatka an island instead of a peninsula🤦‍♂️ www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09...

Is 200 earthquakes in just over a month normal for southeast Australia? It is, if your seismic network is dense enough and you’re dedicated to detailed data analysis. Staff at the Seismology Research Centre have manually located more than 35000 earthquakes over the last 50 years.

Another large earthquake just struck off Kamchatka, Russia. USGS reports magnitude 7.7. Energy waves now arriving in Australia.

Question for earthquake instrumentation people: what's the distinction between a "Low Gain" and a "High Gain" Seismometer? What's the V/m/s level above of below which we define the Instrument Code as H or L? Old school passives were generally under 400V/m/s. Is that it? ds.iris.edu/ds/nodes/dmc...

What’s a funny or clever collective noun for your (or any other) occupation? Make one up in the comments, or like the one in there that you think is the best so far.

This morning's magnitude 5.6 earthquake is the largest to have occurred in southeast Queensland since the magnitude 5.6 earthquake off Fraser Island in 2015. The Fraser Is quake was followed by magnitude 5.4 and 5.2 aftershocks in the following days, a reminder that further large events are possible

#earthquake #gympie #queensland #brisbane

#earthquake #gympie #queensland #brisbane

I think I’ve got you all, but if you’re a seismologist that’s following me and I’m not following you back, let me know with a like. Sometimes I miss notifications or don’t notice the role in a bio.

The wiggly lines of a seismogram can sometimes hide small but important signals at other frequencies. This is why we also look at spectrograms! Interesting recent recordings include #kangaroos #rockfalls #sonicbooms from meteors & rockets, and crowds at #football #travisscott & #taylorswift concerts

Some schools can get involved with Science Week by looking at their seismographs to see the magnitude 6.1 earthquake that occurred in West Papua an hour ago. There are about 50 schools across the country with an @auscope.bsky.social seismograph. Here's what they recorded, as seen on Seismosphere

Let's see is we can find this non-earthquake on our seismographs! Last week we detected the NSW rockfall, and last night a meteor shook houses in central Victoria. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08...

I’ve been wanting to get this into the wild for ages, and we’re almost there. Hopefully this will make our software even more accessible and useful. More features and fixes coming too. This is just a sneak peek.

A colleague noticed this Facebook post about a massive rockfall in the Blue Mountains, so I looked at the overnight records to see if it was visible. The closest station was 30km away, and a spike in the spectrogram at 3:05am had me check other nearby stations, which all rumbled for about a minute.

Probably a good time to do this: *Do people have questions about earthquakes?* We have a lot of seismologists on Bluesky and we are very willing to answer whatever questions you might have....

I received a comment about feeling like we're getting more magnitude 6+ earthquakes lately. It's funny how recent news can influence our perceptions. Here's global M6+ earthquakes for the last 25 years, and zoomed to the last 3 years. It's human nature to look for patterns. What do you see?

This is why we use 3D sensors in earthquake data analysis. I selected a seismogram that highlights how the vertical channel has a clearer P-wave onset. The S-wave arrival on this channel is really unclear compared to the horizontals. Low-frequency high-energy S-waves are often the destructive phases

Could a larger earthquake follow the M8.8 at Kamchatka? It would be unprecedented, but megaquakes have had similarly sized aftershocks in the past: an 8.3 at the nearby Kuril Islands in 2006 was followed by an 8.1 two months later; and an 8.0 in PNG in 1971 was follow by an 8.1 just two weeks later.

Glad to be able to share a bit of knowledge about earthquake and tsunami monitoring on ABC News Breakfast this morning www.facebook.com/breakfastnew...

Want to learn more about earthquakes like today's M8.7? Get your info straight from the experts with this spectacular list of seismologists! Assembled by the awesome @geohenning.bsky.social: go.bsky.app/ND4oS9k

NEW: You may wonder why Japan’s 2011 mag-9.1 quake created a colossal tsunami that killed 18,000 people, while today’s mag-8.8 quake made a big, but not catastrophic, tsunami. For @sciam.bsky.social, I explore why. (Hint: it’s because the 2011 quake was SO much stronger.)

The timing of this post was almost prescient! If any researchers need to publish their work on the magnitude 8.8 Kamchatka earthquake and related tsunami, don’t forget that Seismica has rapidly peer-reviewed “Fast Reports” that average about a month from submission to publication.

I missed a lot of today’s major earthquake action while out in the bush doing off-road driving and recovery training. Great course run by 4WD Victoria. Now I’m getting up to speed with the earthquake and tsunami for a bunch of impending interviews.

Finally getting official 4WD training! It’s great fun trying out all of the modern electronic features in a safe and stress free environment before needing to use them in the field with the @earthquakes.au vehicle. My colleague Wayne even let me have a go in his personal Suzuki Jimny. Very cool