Local News - March 2003

What’s shakin’? East Lincoln High students are seismologically savvy

Editor’s note: Due to a production error in the Feb. 26 issue of ShoreLine, this article is being reprinted.

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By JEREMY ASHTON, Staff Writer

March 5, 2003 - DENVER — Eastern Lincoln County isn’t typically thought of as a great place to study geological activity.

There are no volcanoes and only the occasional tremor, which, more often than not, is the result of blasting at the local quarries.

Yet every day before Deborah Michael’s earth and environmental science class starts, two of her students are on separate computers hunting for earthquakes.

One is sifting through the U.S. Geological Survey’s Web site in search of a quake. The other is comparing that data to readings taken on a seismograph — set up on a concrete slab in Michael’s storage closet.

“It’s amazing that we’ve got this equipment,” said Chris McLean, one of Michael’s students.

Michael’s classes feel less like being in school and more like being in a working laboratory. And the daily seismograph readings represent a tiny fraction of what goes on.

A couple of weeks ago, Michael, who teaches astronomy in the fall, took her students to the gymnasium at East and set up a Star Lab — a portable, inflatable planetarium. She spent two class periods showing them the night sky over Lincoln County and describing the constellations and their origins.

For a couple of years, her classes have aided a professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia with his research by gathering information on aerosol haze using a sun photometer. At one time, Michael said, East had taken more haze data than any school in the world.

Last semester, the students tested the water quality of a nearby stream, earning recognition in an article in the September issue of Geotimes Magazine.

Small research facilities don’t have as many projects in progress simultaneously as Michael’s students, let alone most classes of high school freshmen.

“They seem to like doing real science vs. studying about it from textbooks,” Michael said.

Michael got the seismograph, a device used to measure waves generated by earthquakes, from the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology. The device was paid for using a grant she applied for after going to an earthquake workshop run by the National Science Teachers Association.

From the moment Michael set it up near the beginning of the school year, the seismograph has yielded quantifiable results.

“When I hooked it up the first day, I thought, ‘Gee, this is not going to work because my lines are so big,’” Michael said. “I thought it was a kid hitting the door, but it was a huge earthquake.”

The seismic event she saw that day was in Fiji. The destructive Jan. 22 earthquake in Mexico that measured 7.8 on the Richter scale also registered clearly on the seismograph.

It has picked up major tremors as far away as Alaska and Indonesia and much smaller ones right in Lincoln County’s backyard. Each one is carefully plotted on a world map Michael has hanging in her room.

“I thought it was really cool how they had them all on a graph,” said student Marylou McGuigan.  “Usually, you just think of earthquakes as natural disasters, but when you saw it on there, you got to see it as a thing that has been graphed.”

The constant data collection has seemingly helped make earthquakes more real to the students.

“I find it unique how a bunch of earthquakes happen just about everywhere,” said Cristy Houk. “Some of them are so small you can hardly feel them, and some of them can be so disastrous and destroy a whole city.”

But earthquakes aren’t the only things the seismograph records.

One of the reasons Michael wanted the device was to pick up blasting at the two area quarries. Officials at Lake Norman Quarry have given her the times when blasting is conducted, allowing the students to check the seismograph readings.

The blasting was something Michael expected to see on the seismograph, but she and her students have encountered a few surprises.

Whenever someone opens and closes the refrigerator door in her closet, a unique signature is created on the seismograph. For some reason, though, slamming the classroom door has little to no effect.

“I’ve learned a lot about the technology,” Nina Moody said. “I never knew you could actually measure every little thing.”

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Staff Writer Jeremy Ashton can be reached at 704-735-3031 or jashton@ltnews.com.

© 2001 Lincoln Times-News  

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