Jackie Caplan-Auerbach

Title Authored on Link to edit Content
The excitement of 70,000 Swifties can shake the Earth

The well-situated seismometer first came to public attention in January 2011, when it recorded the response of fans of the Seattle Seahawks, an American football team, to a magnificent touchdown by Marshawn Lynch, a running back known as “Beast Mode”. The “Beast Quake” went down in local…

2023-12-14
13 reasons for Taylor Swift to celebrate her birthday

Seattle seismologist found the crowd's dancing mixed with the booming speakers at Lumen Field caused seismic activity on par with a 2.3 magnitude earthquake. Jackie…

2023-12-14
The Scientist Who Decodes the Songs of Undersea Volcanoes

We often think of volcanoes as skyscraping marvels, but these portals to the geologic underworld also reside underwater. Unfortunately, submarine volcanoes are trickier to study than their terrestrial siblings. But you would be hard-pressed to find anyone more enchanted by them — and more…

2023-11-16
Washington's Volcanoes Are Experiencing Seismic Tremors from an Unlikely Source: Glaciers

Most people think of seismic activity as the result of movement along faults or of violent volcanic eruptions. But seismic events can have other causes, including floods and even large…

2023-10-26
Viral 'Swift Quake' WWU professor aims to make earth science popular

Western Washington University professor Jackie Caplan-Auerbach has rocked the Taylor Swift community following her identification of what has been dubbed the "Swift Quake" — a shake that registered as a 2.3 magnitude earthquake on a seismograph, caused by the musician's recent…

2023-08-10
Major aftershocks are still shaking Turkey. When will the quaking end?

Every earthquake gives rise to aftershocks, their strength proportional to the magnitude of the initial shaking. In the case of the back-to-back quakes in Turkey, many of the ensuing aftershocks have been large enough to cause additional damage and casualties.

“The likelihood of…

2023-02-24
This is how heat from a volcano can be used to power an entire town

If there are any leaks in the pipes, the substance leaking out is simply water or steam, and there is no hazardous waste, Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, a professor of geology at Western Washington University, told ABC News.

Other than the land use and the environmental damage done by the…

2023-02-09
The Tonga eruption explained, from tsunami warnings to sonic booms

Just a few weeks ago, a submarine volcano identifiable by two small uninhabitable islands in the Kingdom of Tonga began to erupt. Its outburst initially seemed innocuous, with ashen plumes and moderate explosions that few people living outside the archipelago noticed.

But in the past 24…

2022-01-18
Earthquake initially centered in Farmington was ‘phantom’ but felt real to residents

Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, a seismologist at Western Washington University, explained it this way in a series of Twitter posts:

“Location algorithms can sometimes yield an incorrect location, though. This is because they are somewhat tuned to what they expect to record. For example, a…

2021-07-09
A Burp or a Blast? Seismic Signals Reveal the Volcanic Eruption to Come

Last December, a gloopy ooze of lava began extruding out of the summit of La Soufrière, a volcano on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent. The effusion was slow at first; no one was threatened. Then in late March and early April, the volcano began to emit seismic waves associated with swiftly…

2021-06-29
Subscribe to Jackie Caplan-Auerbach