Have you ever heard of an icequake? Icequakes occur when groundwater freezes, causing the ground to tremble similar to a small earthquake. The phenomenon is somewhat rare, but recent cold blasts through the Midwest have folks feeling the freeze in more ways than one.
Because the Midwest isn’t a tectonic hotspot, detection relies on citizen scientists – primarily through the Raspberry Shake! u/dulce1021 has a great post on Reddit on how Raspberry Shake confirmed icequakes in Madison, WI.
TLDR: Icequake confirmed!
This is going to get nerdy, so strap in and prepare to be underwhelmed.
You won’t be surprised to learn that there aren’t a ton of professional high-grade seismometers installed in Wisconsin and streaming real-time data. However, there is a decent network of low-cost citizen science seismometers that we can use. These devices are called Raspberry Shakes and you can buy one yourself for a couple hundred bucks and stream live data to their site, which is where I went looking for data. Wouldn’t you know, in a city as nerdy as Madison, there were a handful of Raspberry Shakes with data to look at.
See more about the Raspberry Shake from the Adafruit Blog:
- Raspberry Shake Detects Quakes #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi
- Build a seismograph with Raspberry Shake @Raspberry_Pi #PiDay #RaspberryPi
- Oklahoma State Uses 100 Earthquake-Monitoring Raspberry Pis with Raspberry Shake @Raspberry_Pi #PiDay #RaspberryPi
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