March 2010  

Monthly report

March has been a busy month, with Kambah ( Marion Leiba) officially coming on-line, and the installation of new stations at Penrose and Katoomba NSW. There are still problems at these stations however, which may take some time to resolve. The station at Mt Victoria (opened last November) was closed. It has been concluded that the high background noise levels there were emanating from the relatively close Clarence coal mine. However, it did record some local earthquakes well during its period of operation, eg, the Mag 3.3 event Nelson Bay north of Newcastle in February. [Latest Earthquakes ]

It has been a busy month seismically – in the eastern states at least. Numerous events have occurred near Orange (5 –15 March), but it seems they can be attributed to problems in the Cadia Gold Mine.

Map of events in the area below. A relatively large earthquake at Nelson bay north of Newcastle (11^th Mar 2010, Mag 3.3) was widely felt and some good recordings were made on our network. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/03/12/2843866.htm.

The Penrose station picked up one of the Cadia events quite well.

Another reasonably sized earthquake ( mag 3.0) occurred at Portarlington on Port Phillip Bay, Victoria on 30th March, and was also widely felt, but was not recorded on any of our stations. Below is a trace from G.A. station at Toolangi, VIC.

More details [Latest Earthquakes ] page on the RSUW web site.

ABC news article http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/03/30/2860590.htm

In Western Australia it has been fairly quiet, and only a few “micro” events were detected at the Beacon and Gnowangerup stations. The new station at Pinjarra high school has a high level of background noise, and needs to be moved to a quieter spot if it is going to record anything but quite large events. However, it may be picking up blasts from the nearby Bauxite mine.

Kambah detected quite a small quarry blast, which was subsequently located by Kevin McCue as coming from the Mugga Mugga quarry, Thanks Kevin.

One of the big problems has been school PC’s automatically being shut down after hours. This seems to have been resolved at Gundaroo Primary, but has yet to be overcome at Penrose PS.

Broome HS has continued to record Mag 5 events from the Banda Sea. It has also been found that relatively small, but deep events ( eg Mag 5.4 at 500 km) from the Fiji region, and also New Ireland, can been seen on some of our stations ( eg MT Torrens, Beacon and Gnowangerup) if we zoom in far enough and look carefully. See [Latest Earthquakes]