11:40:17 UTC today M 6.6 earthquake in the Andaman Islands region of the Bay of Bengal. There were no reports of casualties or Tsunami warning. The PAUL Helicorder is now on http://www.iris.edu/amaseis/schools/

Just discernible on the PAUL helicorder trace a M5.4 earthquake off the coast of southern Greece on Saturday 21st June 11:36:25 UT what made it discernible was the relative shallow depth of 16.9 km compared to the M5.4 event in southern greece on 18th June 01:58 UT at a depth of 65.8Km.

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This Mw6.9 earthquake in Japan is reported by the BBC as causing 2 fatalaties (at 8am). Remarkably few for such a big earthquake in a densly populated country. However it was really interesting to read about the Japanese early warning system coming in to action... seismologists in Japan get live data from thousands of sensors across the country and can automatically detect an event, locate it and determine it's magnitude within a few seconds of the rupture starting, this can give a few 10's of seconds warning of the seismic waves reaching the nearest big city, enough time to automatically slow down the superfast bullet trains, put nuclear power stations into safe mode etc and thereby mitigate any damaging effects.

Another way of getting data from your station onlne is to set up a system for automatically posting screen-images from the PC running to a website.

IRIS have a page with data from 29 schools all posted together
http://www.iris.edu/amaseis/schools/

Justin Sharpe at Beal high school is there and has also got live data onto his school website http://www.geo-world.org/bhuk.html

Instructions for doing this using teh snaggit software are at John Lahrs website http://jclahr.com/science/psn/as1/snagit8/snagit8_setup.h

Geoff Coll was the first to send this one in. Reported as Mw=6.1 or Mb=6.2 (initially reprted as 6.5) This event near Patras is reported to have caused some casualties. This is larger than the largest event ever detected in the UK.

20:02 UT today  M 5.6 earthquake just off the coast of Northern Algeria, no reports of casualties.

The Helicorder trace from PAUL shows the two M 6.4 earthquakes today , the first at 01:57 UT in the Batan Islands region of the Phillipines and the second at 14:31 UT in the Macquarie Lslands.

There was a M 6.2 earthquake in Iceland at 15:46 UT today.

 The epicentre was at Selfoss 50km from the capital Reykjavik, being a shallow event (10Km) there was a lot of shaking and there are reports of serious damage to buildings and the road between Selfoss and Reykajavik is closed, thankfully at this time there are no reports of casualties. The bbc news website carries the latest reports and video of the earthquake. Update; 20 people treated for minor injuries.

The trace and travel time curves from PAUL were retrieved from the IRIS site using the "stations " programme, PAUL is continually uploading data via "upload". (apart form the occasional glitch!)

     

Earthquakes on mid-ocean spreading ridges are very common, however they are usually smaller than M6.0 so this event (Mw=6.4) is quite unusual

What is the point of seismology if it cannot predict or prevent earthquakes? As the casualty figures from China approach 50,000 this is a question that you might find yourself being askled or asking yourself. It is a very important question that every seismologist has to answer at some point in their career. I usually end up talking about the things that seismology has been able to do. We have been very succesful at probabalistic analysis of earthquakes. For any location on the planet it is possible to calculate fairly accurately what the probability that a certain threshold of ground shaking will be exceeded within a 50 year period. This is not useful for evacuating populations before a big event but it is used extensively to ensure that building codes in earthquake prone zones are sufficient to withstand the likely effects. Unfortunately many earthquakes happen in areas where building codes are not adhered to or have many buildings thta are too old to be covered by these recent advances in understanding. In many cases effective mitigation of the effects of earthquake is a political and economic problem rather than a technical scientific one. Scientists need to ensure that the results of their research is communicated effectively to those in power in the field of seismology as much as in other fields (eg climate change)