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Scientists Step Up Efforts to Solve Clintonville's Seismic Mystery
Susan Bence
WUWM NEWS | Mar 30, 2012
After more than a week of strange sounds and sensations – the residents of “normally quiet” Clintonville, Wisconsin hope to get more answers.
They have already been stunned to learn that a 1.5 magnitude earthquake caused at least some of the vibrations, but they continue.
A team of scientists is preparing to install seismometers in the community 40 miles west of Green Bay.
The delicate devices register “shifts” in the earth.
WUWM Environmental Reporter Susan Bence spoke with a few of the experts hoping to narrow down the location and source of the continuing seismic activity.
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Greg Waite is on the road when I reach him.
He figures the trip from his lab in Michigan to Clintonville will take about four hours.
He is less sure what is causing the seismic activity in the small Wisconsin town.
It’s not that Waite doesn’t know his earthquakes.
The Michigan Tech assistant professor of geophysics spends most of his time studying them.
“Well actually most of my work is in other countries, in Central America and South America, I study volcanic seismicity mostly,” Waite says.
Something as small as Clintonville’s 1.5 “rumbling” would normally be a blip on a monitor, but Waite’s interest was piqued by the continuing “swarm” of seismic activity.
“It’s so rare to have earthquakes in the upper Midwest,” Waite says.
Waite will not only monitor ground vibration, he’s hoping special microphones will pick up the low frequency sounds residents are reporting – the creaks, cracks and rumbles.
“It’s rare that there are good recordings of those sounds, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to try to collect good data to get a better of that phenomenon,” Waite says.
Everything Waite’s equipment detects will be funneled to U.S. Geological Survey scientists in Golden, Colorado. Dr. Harley Benz is shipping is “cell modums” to Clintonville, to link Waite’s system with the Colorado facility.
“It’s kind of a fancy cell phone in that it’s always on and it’s always transmitting data. So it connects to cell towers and so we can take data straight out of these seismograph stations. And if people feel something or hear something, we can look at the data immediately and figure out what it might have been,” Benz says.
Benz echoes Greg Waite’s words - that a quake as small as Clintonville’s would normally go unnoticed, but the mystery of what is happening there, is worth investigating.
“We can learning something from this exercise; to understand how the earth works. In places where earthquakes are rare; you know, the central and eastern U.S. have earthquakes but they’re more infrequent than, say in the western U.S. So we can learn something scientifically from this about the earthquake process. The other thing is people are concerned and rattled, and no pun intended. These things are waking them up; we don’t know what they are and we have technologies that might help to address this and so the state is asking for help and we have an obligation to help,” Benz says.
Another scientist – much closer to Clintonville – is also tuned into the case.
Steve Dutch teaches geoscience at the University of Wisconsin - Green Bay.
“We could conceivably have an unmapped fault below Clintonville. We have no information really about what’s under the surface there and stresses in the crust could be causing it to slip,” Dutch says.
Dutch plans to test his own theories. He suspects the quakes and strange noises might be related to the town’s groundwater levels.
“Apparently the ground water table is very low there right now and if you remove water from underground it removes some of the support for the rocks; and if the rocks settle they could creek and slip a little bit,” Dutch says.
As scientists ruminate and set up equipment, Lisa Kuss looks forward to easing residents’ anxiety.
She’s Clintonville’s city administrator.
“Night after night after night you’re being woken up with your house sounding like something’s exploding, that something hit your house, that you can’t sleep because it jars your whole house. That phenomenon, no matter what it’s being caused from, is disruptive to people’s lives,” Kuss says.
Kuss says it’s HER job to assure 4600 residents that Clintonville is a safe place to call home.
http://www.wuwm.com/news/wuwm_news.php?articleid=10151
) but I just watched the latest picture Dutchsinse posted. It's circled in red. Can't miss it. And what I found is spooky. Before you disagree, go look.