Scientists revealed yesterday that the huge Earthquake that rocked Japan in 2011 and sent a tsunami rolling onto its coasts could be heard from space! The study comes on the 2nd anniversary of the disaster and looks at how a satellite circling the Earth detected low frequency sound waves generated by the massive shift in the planet's crust, when the earthquake hit.
"The atmospheric infrasounds following the great Tohoku earthquake... induced variations of air density and vertical acceleration of the GOCE platform," said a report published in the US-published journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The Gravity Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) is a super-sensitive satellite run by the European Space Agency. Earthquakes don't just create seismic waves that travel through the planet but some of the large tremors cause the surface of the planet to vibrate like a drum producing sound waves that travel upwards through the atmosphere and out to space. GOCE is designed to capture and register these signals, acting like an orbital sismograph. The instrument can pick up an acceleration of airwaves due to the vibrations. This provides another source of monitoring areas affected by quakes.
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