It is known that volcanoes, hurricanes and meteors produce infrasonic booms. A new study from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico reports that Earthquakes also emit infrasounds when travelling through the Earth crust where the Earth’s surface transmit the earthquake’s infrasonic tumult into the air like a speaker for low-frequency vibrations. The sounds are pretty hard to catch since they are only emitted only above a quake’s hypocenter, the point where a fault begins to rip apart. The source of these strange earthquake sounds was thought to be the result of vibrations in nearby mountains. This discovery is based on the analysis of a 4.6 earthquake that occurred Jan. 3, 2011, in Circleville, Utah. It will permit to predict what we expect to see from earthquakes versus underground explosions.
The study results will be presented at the annual meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Kansas City, Missouri on October 25 2012.
Besides Earthquakes, elephants and rhinoceros can hear and communicate in infrasound.
