In late July to October 2022, residents of the Manu’a Islands in American Samoa felt the earth shake several times a day, raising concerns of an imminent volcanic eruption or tsunami.
In late July to October 2022, residents of the Manu’a Islands in American Samoa felt the earth shake several times a day, raising concerns of an imminent volcanic eruption or tsunami.
An earthquake catalog for the area turned up nothing, because the islands lacked a seismic monitoring network that could measure the shaking and aid seismologists in their search for the source of the earthquake swarm.
But the residents of the Taʻū, Ofu, and Olosega islands needed answers, so Clara Yoon of the U.S. Geological Survey and her colleagues found another way to fill in the seismic blanks. They used machine learning and another technique called template matching on shaking data recorded from a single seismic sensor located 250 kilometers away from the American Samoa swarm.
In The Seismic Record, Yoon and colleagues share how they tracked the swarm using these single-station data, combined with shaking reports from residents, until local permanent seismic stations were installed in American Samoa in August and September 2022.
Read more at Seismological Society of America
