IDEAS Trainee and PhD Student in Earth and Planetary Sciences Vivian Tang summarizes Earthquake Detective’s latest findings below:

Citizen scientists help identify local seismic events whose recorded signals are much smaller than those associated with the surface waves that have triggered these local events in Alaska. The local events include small earthquakes as well as tectonic tremor.

While progress has been made in understanding how these events might be triggered by surface waves from large teleseismic earthquakes around the world, there is no consensus on its physical mechanism.

A better understanding of triggered seismic events is expected to provide important clues towards a fundamental understanding of the physical mechanisms that connect different earthquakes and other slip events.

In our study, we ask citizens to listen to relevant sections of seismograms that are converted to audible frequencies. Citizen scientists detected multiple local earthquakes in central and south-central Alaska.

From the experts’ and citizen scientists’ classifications, we determined that citizen scientists achieve 94.3% reliability in detecting earthquakes from 158 seismograms and 82.7% accuracy in detecting noise from 52 seismograms for which 7 of 10 citizen scientists agreed. Additionally, we compared a subset of classifications from a machine-learning algorithm, citizen scientists and seismologists with each other and with the earthquake classifications of citizen scientists. Both the citizen scientists and the machine-learning algorithm perform well in identifying earthquakes, but the citizen scientists outperformed the machine-learning algorithm in labeling non-earthquake signals.

Click here for more information on Earthquake Detective’s Zooniverse project.