COVID-19 Lockdowns and Seismology

The final major topic of this course is earthquakes, the environment, and the challenge of living on an active planet. An interesting aspect of my own experience of transitioning to online learning and adding the new topic of COVID-19 was how my own seismology research overlapped with teaching this course. Specifically, what was happening in (online) class (spring semester 2020) was a big part of the motivation for what quite quickly resulted in my involvement in a paper published in Science by a global team of dozens of seismologists around the world (Lecocq, et al., 2020; with a global team of 76 coauthors, including A.L. Kafka).

While adjusting to working mostly online, seismologists around the world observed a “seismic hush”, a global quieting of seismic noise due to the pandemic lockdowns. This decrease in seismic noise, now known to be a result of the COVID-19 decrease in human activity, was seen very clearly on seismic stations around the world, including here on BC campus. In fact, it is seen on a seismograph in the same building where this course is taught! Collaborating online with those 75 other seismologists, it became clear that what I was seeing at BC was connected to a global pattern. And our paper is about how we analyzed the seismic data so that the global "seismic hush" signal could be visualized.

This turned out to be much more of a teaching/research synergism than I could have ever imagined, and the BC seismic recordings are well-represented in that paper. The online class discussions from this course became motivation for my participation in this research, and the research was developing while the newly implemented online course was developing.

This is a very new and different area of research, part of what seismologists are now referring to as "Social Seismology", in this case connecting seismology directly to COVID-19 human activities and epidemiology. Nobody expected the pandemic to be such a major part of all aspects of life, including a wide range of science research, and specifically seismology. The topics for this course are, indeed, a moving target, and this situation now provides a good lead into the next part of the course on earthquakes and the environment, and gives the students some experience with how new ideas in science research unfold.

Reference:

Lecocq, T., et al. (2020), with a global team of 76 coauthors, including A.L. Kafka, Global Quieting of High-Frequency Seismic Noise Due to COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdown Measures, Science, 10.1126/science.abd2438. sites.google.com/bc.edu/alan-kafka/covid-19-seismic-quiet