The 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake—felt from space
Thursday, April 23, 2015 - 10:00
in Astronomy & Space
For the first time, a natural source of infrasonic waves of Earth has been measured directly from space—450 kilometers above the planet's surface. The source was the massive 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake in Japan, and its signature was detected at this orbital altitude only eight minutes after the arrival of seismic and infrasonic waves, according to Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech's Yu-Ming (Oscar) Yang and colleagues in collaboration with the University of New Brunswick, Canada, who present their research today at the annual meeting of the Seismological Society of America (SSA).