emerge
Using a small device called Raspberry Shake, people around the world are tuning in to the Earth’s vibrations.
Everything felt quiet as Marc Cesaire, a high school earth science teacher, watched a live stream of the Rolling Loud hip-hop festival at Citi Field from his apartment a few miles away in Queens, NY
It was 4:55 PM on October 30, 2021, and rapper Fivio Foreign was playing to an audience of thousands. As the set neared its end, Cesaire, 43, saw the audience jumping with increasing intensity, so he set up a second live feed, streaming data from a small, low-cost seismograph called Raspberry Shake, which he had just made. installed in his classroom at the nearby Civic Leadership Academy.
“The seismograph seemed to pick up on the crowd jumping up and down from 2.1 miles away,” Cesaire said. “You couldn’t feel it, but Queens was shaking to the beat.”
The Raspberry Shake — a small device that combines a low-cost computer called a Raspberry Pi with a monitor that measures tiny ground motion — has been helping to make seismology more accessible to the public since 2016. Raspberry Shakes are less sophisticated than professional seismographs, but a fraction of the cost, and about 1,600 of the devices are scattered around the planet, livestreaming their open access data online to form the largest, real-time seismic network in the world. The network of “Shakers,” as the community likes to call themselves, is made up of hobbyists, professionals, and educators, whose instruments pick up the seismic waves of earthquakes, as well as the daily hum of their immediate surroundings.
“You’d expect a flat line on the seismogram, but there’s always movement,” said Steve Caron, 54, a business systems analyst and citizen scientist who streams his device’s live data on YouTube from Chino Hills, California. The Caron seismogram referred to is a recording of the ground’s movements, via a graph showing time on the horizontal axis and ground displacement on the vertical axis, usually measured in nanometers. “Everything is moving all the time,” he added, “but only scientists and hobbyists like me ever really notice.”
In New York, Cesaire regularly checks his Raspberry Shake data in the morning or during his lunch break. “You start to become aware of how structured and planned urban life is,” he said. “You see when the Long Island Rail Road comes by and construction starts, when the HVAC and computers come on in the school.”
Typically, scientists bury seismographs in vaults deep underground, a practice designed to drown out the tremors created by humans — what they call “cultural noise” — to get a clearer picture of Earth’s own activity. . But for many Shakers, installing cheaper seismographs at home was proof that the distinctive patterns created by everyday activities — traditionally considered undesirable to capture — could be fascinating in their own right.
“The washing machine has good signals,” said Amy Gilligan, 34, a geologist in Aberdeen, Scotland. Leda Sánchez Bettucc, 55, a geologist in Montevideo, Uruguay, plays a game with her daughter to guess whether the vibrations are coming from the blender, the vacuum cleaner, or her son practicing the violin.
Shakers share seismograms with each other on Twitter claps of thunder, powerlifting workouts, building neighborhood and other curious recordings, with the hashtag #WhatsTheWiggle. Caron, who sometimes sees the footprints of a badger family appear in his data, said there were still many mysteries. You have to play detective: “There are some wavy lines I see every night, but I have no idea what they are. What’s oscillating like that at 3 a.m.?
While cultural noise is constantly bouncing up and down on Shaker live streams, ultimately it’s the signature vertical spike of an earthquake that Shakers are after, and the data they collect often aids the work of scientists as well. As Wendy Bohon, 45, a geologist and the communications strategist for the Earth Science Division at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, explained, “in really significant earthquakes, the waves are so big they can go around the Earth several times.” Seismographs, both professional and DIY, can record those waves as they travel thousands of miles across the surface and through the planet’s interior.
In the moments after a larger quake, Shakers share screenshots of data from their devices, creating a bigger picture of how a wave traveled through the Earth to reach each of them. Digital connectivity reveals geological connectivity, Caron noted.
For Takaaki Hattori, 34, a Shaker and naturalist guide in Okinawa, Japan, “When there’s a big earthquake in the distance and I see the tremors at home, I realize we all live on a single planet called Earth.”
In 2020, live data from both Shakers and professionals revealed that Covid lockdown measures worldwide had reduced the planet’s seismic noise by up to 50 percent. “I noticed it right away,” says Ben Orchard, 55, a software developer in Temecula, California. Looking at the data from his Raspberry Shake, “every day was a weekend” as cultural noise such as commuter cars and school buses from Southern California faded.
“The world is already noisy — there are winds, trees, animals and waves breaking,” said Bohon, the geologist. “And people amplify that sound. I think of us as busy little ants crawling around on the surface. For a while we all just fell asleep, and the world went on without us.”
After observing the planet’s seismic lull, Clemens Finkelstein, 33, a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University’s School of Architecture, placed a Raspberry Shake in the CIVA Museum in Brussels for his “Sick Architecture” exhibition last summer. “I wanted to show people coming into space the vibrational impact they have on their environment,” Finkelstein said. Some visitors took the liberty of stamping their feet, actively engaging the sensor.
Finkelstein’s experience with “dark spaces, techno music and the feeling that something is touching your guts” in nightclubs in his hometown of Berlin initially led him to study the phenomenon of “all-present, all-touching” vibration, he said.
Orchard calls it “the planet’s unheard-of symphony.” When he moved with his wife and two children from Victoria, Australia to Southern California in 2008 – a “difficult and stressful” move – he installed a raspberry shake in his backyard to put everyone’s mind at ease after they first noticed the error activity of their new experienced at home. . “It may seem like a big earthquake, but is it really? Well, look at the data,” he said.
Back in rural Victoria, across the Pacific Ocean and more than 8,000 miles away, Orchard’s father followed the daily “buzz” of Temecula on his son’s live stream. “It connected him to us,” said Orchard, who sent his father a Raspberry Shake for Father’s Day in 2017. Today, Orchard tracks the two streams of data side-by-side on the dashboard of his computer and an iPad next to the living room television, the cigar-shaped vibration of the grain train passing his father’s house in the morning, the sudden peaks of the surf crashing against Victoria’s cliffs when a storm hits, or the flashes of his father planting a fig tree in the garden. “Observing my father’s tranquility now brings me back home,” Orchard said.
When a magnitude 6.6 earthquake hit the remote and largely uninhabited Kermadec Islands near New Zealand in March, Orchard first saw it appear on his father’s seismograph in Victoria, and then four minutes later, the earthquake as a clear burst of spikes on the Raspberry Shake monitor in his home. “Together we can watch that base note the planet just played ripple through the Earth, bouncing back and forth between us as it plays on a global sound system.”
Surfacing is a column exploring the intersection of art and life produced by Alicia DeSantis, Jolie Ruben, Tala Safie and Josephine Sedgwick.