18 Mar 2011

Underwater sounds of Japanese earthquake

The Laboratory of Applied Bioacoustics at the University of Catalonia recorded the sound of the earthquake that hit Japan last week, as it sounded underwater.

Quake graph

The sound was recorded by a network of underwater observatories belonging to the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, located astride the epicentre of the quake.

The recording can be heard at http://listentothedeep.com/acoustics/index.html.

The underwater observatories off Japan have been continuously recording the sounds of the region, picking up the major earthquake and its aftershocks. The sounds had to be accelerated 16 times to make them audible to the human ear. The spectograms on the website illustrate the intensity and energy distribution of the earthquake sound.

The LIDO (Listening to the Deep Ocean environment) project is monitoring and evaluating human and natural contributions to marine ambient noise.