Tsunami earthquake sound record was not shared to the world

(CNN) -- Scientists are gaining insight about December's devastating
earthquake and tsunami from the actual sounds of the magnitude 9.3 quake in
the Indian Ocean.

"It's really quite an eerie sound to hear the earth ripping apart like that.
We hear it on smaller earthquakes quite frequently but something of this
scale that goes on for eight minutes is very much unprecedented," said Maya
Tolstoy, a marine geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth
Observatory.

"It really gave me the chills when I first heard it," she said.

The dramatic soundtrack of the rupture of the Sumatra-Andaman Fault comes
from a little known, and sometimes hard- to- access resource. The
microphones that captured the sound are part of a global network of
instruments that monitor compliance with the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban
Treaty.

The microphones that picked up this earthquake were located in Diego Garcia,
an island more than 1,700 miles from the epicenter of the quake.

The sounds suggest two distinct stages of the underwater temblor.

"What we are able to see is very clearly two phases in the speed of the
rupture," said Tolstoy.

"The first third is much faster, the second two thirds slower," she said.
The length of the rupture was about 750 miles.

"I look at it mathematically and I study the change in direction of the
earthquake," she said. "We are able to tell how long it ruptured, how fast
it went, and those are important things to know for disaster mitigation,"
she said.

Tolstoy and other scientists have had some access to data from the
monitoring group, The Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear
Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO). In the past researchers have obtained
the sounds of other earthquakes, and even the noises made when icebergs
cracked.

But a spokeswoman for CTBTO, headquartered in Vienna, Austria, says the
group does not have the capability to act as a disaster alert system.

"Our mandate is watching for nuclear weapons testing," said Daniela
Rozgonova. "We don't share data directly with scientists. Our data is
collected and analyzed, and goes to member states. They decide what to do
with it," she said. A total of 121 countries have ratified the nuclear test
ban treaty, agreeing "not to carry out any nuclear weapon test explosion or
any other nuclear explosion, and to prohibit and prevent any such nuclear
explosion at any place under its jurisdiction or control."

But because of the deaths and destruction of last year's Asian tsunami,
Rozgonova did say the organization would now share seismic observation data
with UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural
Organization. That group is working with many countries that are trying to
improve early warning systems for tsunamis. But she stressed there is no way
the information could be relayed "real time."

"It's a very sensitive issue obviously because you are monitoring the globe
and you can hear relatively small sounds, and so countries are very
sensitive about having that information openly released," said Tolstoy.

Tolstoy's research based on the earthquake sounds is published in the
July/August issue of Seismological Research Letters.

She said she and other scientists, like many people around the world, felt a
real helplessness in watching the effects of the tsunami.

"We obviously can't prevent earthquakes but we'd like to be able to help
prevent as much of the damage as possible from a tsunami by providing
warning where it's possible. So in the long term we want to better
understand how these events happen so we can better mitigate against them,"
she said.

Bam wrote:

(CNN) -- Scientists are gaining insight about December's devastating
earthquake and tsunami from the actual sounds of the magnitude 9.3 quake in
the Indian Ocean.

"It's really quite an eerie sound to hear the earth ripping apart like that.
We hear it on smaller earthquakes quite frequently but something of this
scale that goes on for eight minutes is very much unprecedented," said Maya
Tolstoy, a marine geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth
Observatory.

"It really gave me the chills when I first heard it," she said.

The dramatic soundtrack of the rupture of the Sumatra-Andaman Fault comes
from a little known, and sometimes hard- to- access resource. The
microphones that captured the sound are part of a global network of
instruments that monitor compliance with the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban
Treaty.

The microphones that picked up this earthquake were located in Diego Garcia,
an island more than 1,700 miles from the epicenter of the quake.

The sounds suggest two distinct stages of the underwater temblor.

--
Maybe there is another precursor stage?

--

Earth punctured by tiny cosmic missiles
By Robert Matthews, Science Correspondent
(Filed: 12/05/2002)

FORGET dangers from giant meteors: Earth is facing another threat from
outer space. Scientists have come to the conclusion that two mysterious
explosions in the 1990s were caused by bizarre cosmic missiles.

The two objects were picked up by earthquake detectors as they tore
through Earth at up to 900,000 mph. According to scientists, the most
plausible explanation is that they were "strangelets", clumps of matter
that have so far defied detection but whose existence was posited 20
years ago.

Formed in the Big Bang and inside extremely dense stars, strangelets are
thought to be made from quarks - the subatomic particles found inside
protons and neutrons. Unlike ordinary matter, however, they also contain
"strange quarks", particles normally only seen in high-energy accelerators.

Strangelets - sometimes also called strange-quark nuggets - are
predicted to have many unusual properties, including a density about ten
million million times greater than lead. Just a single pollen-size
fragment is believed to weigh several tons.

They are thought to be extremely stable, travelling through the galaxy
at speeds of about a million miles per hour. Until now, all attempts to
detect them have failed. A team of American scientists believes,
however, that it may have found the first hard evidence for the
existence of strangelets, after scouring earthquake records for signs of
their impact with Earth.

"The scientists looked for events producing two sharp signals, one as it
entered Earth, the other as it emerged again. They found two such
events, both in 1993. The first was on the morning of October 22.
Seismometers in Turkey and Bolivia recorded a violent event in
Antarctica that packed the punch of several thousand tons of TNT. The
disturbance then ripped through Earth on a route that ended with it
exiting through the floor of the Indian Ocean off Sri Lanka just 26
seconds later - implying a speed of 900,000 mph."

Mo
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...Fwnugg12. xml
--
Any correlation with the Tsunami, ya think?

--
BBC NEWS | World | South Asia | Eyewitness: Sri Lanka tsunami
The BBC's Roland Buerk describes escaping from the tsunami that smashed
into Sri
Lanka's south coast.
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4125581.stm
--



Stranglets? Q-Balls?



--
http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf132/sf132p05.htm

"As a matter of fact, Japan's Kamiokande neutrino detector, which
contains 50,000 tons of water surrounded by a shell of detectors, has
been "blinded' several times by the passage of entities that could well
be Q-balls. If these bizarre entities do exist, they could be that dark
matter that astronomers insist pervades the cosmos."

--

Many candidates have been proposed to play the dark-matter role. One of
the more popular possibilities is that vast sea of neutrinos pervading
the cosmos -- if they really do display just a hint of mass. Two other
candidates now on the table are so bizarre that we marvel at the
ingenuity of the theorists. One involves exceedingly large particles,
the other unbelievably tiny clumps of particles.

At the "giant" end of the size spectrum are galaxy-size particles
weighing only 10-24 as much as an electron, which is itself by no means
large. It would be hard to experimentally distinguish such ethereal
particles from a hard vacuum. A Princeton team, led by W. Hu, asserts
that such particles would coalesce into giant globs of "fuzzy", cold,
dark matter.

Now if only Hu et al would tell us how to detect them! (Pease, Roland:
"Globs in Space" New Scientist, p. 5, August 26, 2000.)


So-called "Q-balls" are also candidates for dark matter. Theorists claim
that Q-balls were created during the Big Bang and may still be roaming
the universe. Far from being ethereal,

Each one is like "a new universe in a nutshell" [A. Kusenko] says.
Inside a Q-ball, the familiar forces that hold our world together don't
exist. This has some startling consequences. It means that every Q-ball
is on a mission to violate law and order in the universe by assimilating
normal matter and compelling it to live by Q-ball rules.

Who can deny the exotic nature of Q-balls after that description?
Q-balls are so tiny (about the size of an iron nucleus) and move so fast
(about 100 kilometers/ second) that they can zip through a planet with
scarcely any observable effect. In this elusiveness they resemble
neutrinos. As a matter of fact, Japan's Kamiokande neutrino detector,
which contains 50,000 tons of water surrounded by a shell of detectors,
has been "blinded' several times by the passage of entities that could
well be Q-balls. If these bizarre entities do exist, they could be that
dark matter that astronomers insist pervades the cosmos.

(Muir, Hazel; "Cosmic Anarchists," New Scientist, p. 22, May 20, 2000.)