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It’s not much to look at, but the seismometer installed recently at Wentworth College is a highly sensitive and accurate instrument and a source of fascination for science students.
Seismic activity is constantly and automatically recorded on a computer next to the machine, which is in the science staffroom at the school, and automatically fed to a website.
On August 5, at 4.20am, the instrument recorded its first earthquake – a shake measuring 4 on the Richter Scale centred 177km underneath Tauranga, and on August 10 it recorded one from the Solomon Islands.
The seismometer in schools project, known as Ru, has been running for three years and its head, Dr Kasper van Wijk of Auckland University, says it aims to engage young people in science. This is the first one to be installed on the Hibiscus Coast.
“We think it is worth learning about the forces and dynamics that form our country –the same forces that give rise to seismic activity of our ‘Shaky Isles’, in a playful, inquisitive, and open-ended project such as Ru,” Dr van Wijk says.
Information collated from around 19 stations at schools nationwide is collated and analysed by the university.
Douglas Muller, head of science at Wentworth says the station is capable of detecting very large earthquakes happening anywhere in the world or smaller ones if they occur nearby.
Ru uses a cheap, robust and easy-to-build seismometer called the TC1. Assembling and running the system introduces students to a number of concepts in physics and engineering and the recordings trigger discussions about the dynamics and internal structure of the Earth.
It is expected that the Wentworth seismometer will detect roughly one earthquake a week on average.
