Alright, right out of weekend mode (not a lot of press-releases there) and into week-day mode. A new website, called the Virtual Seismic Atlas, has been opened as a collaboration between University of Leeds and University of Aberdeen (and funded by various energy giants), that gives free a bunch of geological interpretations of seismological data that gives insight into the composition of the earths crust (and what’s to be found under seabeds). This is the kind of data used by oil companies to find oil wells and such, i’ll admit that i had a quick look and realized i had no idea what i was looking at, so it’s probably not something that the general public is going to wet their pants about, but i’m sure that for scientists not given access to this rather exclusive data before, and of course students of geology/geophysics etc, this is great news.

The data is processed from making controlled earthquakes, which is a fancy way of saying “Blowing shit up” (although there are other ways to shake the earth, but you get the idea), in scientific terms it’s called reflection seismology. The earthquake/explosion sends shockwaves through the earths crust, that are then reflected off of various compositions in it. By measuring the time it takes for it to come back, they can tell how far down it is (i’d also imagine that the strength of the reflected wave will tell them something about what it is that reflected it, but i could be way off on that). It’s more or less the same principal you’ll see in radars, where they send out electromagnetic waves and see how/if they are reflected back.