Can you hear it now?
Company that monitors seismic events starts new effort to monitor “infrasound waves.”
As humans, we can hear a lot.
But we can’t hear everything, and a team that introduced the world to the Raspberry Shake microcomputer and its worldwide monitoring network for seismic events is about to kick off another campaign to see what kind of interest is out there to monitor and report infrasound waves using a similar device and network.
Infrasound, they explain, is extremely low frequency sound detectable from great distances that is generated by both natural and man-made events and activities.
Infrasound monitoring devices have been used for decades, but typically were expensive to make and deploy, said Branden Christensen, director of OSOP, a company that develops hardware and software solutions for early warning civil defense systems involving earthquakes and tsunamis.
OSOP created the crowd sourcing Kickstarter campaign for the Raspberry Shake, and he said it seeks to do the same for the Raspberry Boom.
“Most people think of its use through monitoring nuclear test ban treaties. But there are lots of different applications for the science,” he said.
Practical research
Weather, including severe storms, tornadoes and lightning, generates infrasound, as does the interaction between wind and mountains, ocean waves, waterfalls, avalanches, landslides, breaking icebergs and earthquakes. In the atmosphere, infrasound is generated by aurorae and meteors. Man-made activities such as explosions, air and space travel and the operation of wind farms, air conditioners, vehicles and trains generate it too.
And so do volcanoes. Ongoing infrasound research into volcanoes inspired the idea to create the Raspberry Boom, Christensen said.
Jonathan Lees, chair of the University of North Carolina’s Geological Sciences department, uses infrasound sensors to research volcanoes around the world because it helps him understand the dynamics behind volcano explosions.
“Some volcanoes erupt all the time, and as they do, they produce seismic and acoustic waves along with that lava. When their conduits clog up, they start emitting different kinds of signals. That’s important for us to know, for hazard reduction reasons.”
New research
One interesting project tied to the launch of the Raspberry Boom’s Kickstarter campaign will be conducted by Daniel Bowman, a senior geosciences engineer at the Sandia National Laboratories.
Bowman said the research isn’t connected to Sandia, which is a government-owned lab that works to keep the U.S. nuclear stockpile safe, secure and effective.
Instead, his project will advance research he’s been doing for years involving atmospheric balloons.
When the Kickstarter campaign starts on March 22, he intends to release a 42-foot-diameter solarpowered balloon that aims to send a Raspberry Boom about 100,000 feet above the earth’s surface.
Bowman said that altitude is a great place to monitor infrasound, because it doesn’t have to fight its way through wind and other atmospheric pollution.
“Anytime you go to a new place in science, you see things you never expected,” he said.
Global support
Raspberry Boom backers will use crowdsourcing to both build and distribute the microcomputer and to gather its data.
Like the Raspberry Shake, the Raspberry Boom will be built using a Raspberry Pi, a tiny, affordable and flexible computer that runs on Python programming language and has been sold in large numbers since 2011, as the platform for its specialized hardware. People who order a Raspberry Boom either can upgrade their Raspberry Shake devices by adding an additional board and sensor, or can order a readyto-go Raspberry Boom model.
The Kickstarter campaign begins March 22 at raspberryshake.org/ kickstarter-raspberryboom, but people can visit the site now to enter into a competition to win one for free. Christensen said Kickstarter worked great to develop the Raspberry Shake and the Raspberry Shake 4D, a more advanced model, and he said he expects it to work as well for the Raspberry Boom.
Additionally, he said he is excited about the Raspberry Boom’s capability to connect to a global monitoring network that can triangulate and potentially track interesting events.
The Raspberry Shake network, for example, has more than 550 contributors globally and generates data that’s useful to professionals, such as those who work for the U.S. Geological Survey.
“We want a real-time network (for infrasound research) that covers the world. That’s never been done before,” he said.