The Transportable Array: difficult data observation

Last week marked an interesting point in the history of geology. It was announced in Nature that scientists had almost finished completely mapping the whole of the United States seismology in high resolution. 'The Transportable Array', a set of 400 seismometers (see below), has, since 2004, been moving across the country. Elements (stations) in the array are arranged at 70-kilometer intervals. Each one stays in the ground for 2 years before being dug up and moved to the easterly edge. In this way it has moved, over the last 9 years, across from the Pacific to the Atlantic recording observations 40 times per second. This data has provided the scientific community with an unparalleled opportunity to look at the Earth's crust. It has allowed scientists to construct images of the deep earth and trace big earthquakes' movements over the globe.

  [Source: Nature]

Comparing this project to the real-time monitoring of infrastructure or continuous monitoring to the planet's atmosphere by satellites, one could easily be underwhelmed. However, the point to be made through this example is that not every useful variable can be measured easily but that doesn't mean the data is less useful. This might seem like a facile observation but in reality financial resources tend to follow the path of least resistance and projects like this can easily be overlooked. Observing tectonic activity is notoriously difficult. It is also very expensive (the Transportable Array cost US$90 million). However, despite these constraints, long-term data collection projects like this one can be conceived and implemented to huge benefit to society at large not just the Ivory Tower.

Earthquake's continue to plague civilization. They are almost impossible to predict bar vague recurrence statistics. Projects like this can help us drastically improve our knowledge about what's going on under our feet. Similar projects, recording high-resolution data of difficult-to-pin-down variables, should not be swept under the rug.