Originally posted by VX-7R

Originally posted by Shirakawa
Would those shaker trucks mentioned work 24h non-stop for days?
We've had these signals for days since the last relevant quake stroke the area and they have never stopped. It seems unlikely to me that such trucks would be used for all this time, also because of running costs, noise, pollution (remember that we're talking about an important national park).

The main clue for signals of human nature is mainly activity occurring only during working hours, by the way.

[edit on 2009/1/6 by Shirakawa]

Well, it wouldn't need to be the old, huge shaker trucks from 20-30 years ago. I suspect that they could get by with much smaller devices now because the geophones could be more sensitive and the amplifiers and data processing could be more able to filter out noise, etc. Thus, a smaller amount of shaking might be practical.

And yes, they could run them 24-7 if they wanted to do so. If they were really concerned about this, they'd just man them as needed. Or they could be automatically operated remotely, etc............

...............
They could even be some kind of interference to which the seismograph detectors happen to be sensitive.

I have ZERO evidence that this is from some kind of shaker device or devices being used to map things. It's just a thought.

.....Unless with generators... it does not take too much energy, they were doing a time plot map for movement..

don't know....interesting thought tho...

[edit on 6-1-2009 by Mushussu]

The last two "geyser" events have been smaller in amplitude, but close to 20 minutes apart. Maybe it's getting hotter quicker, which heats smaller amounts of water to the boiling point before they explode? In other words, the eruption point happens sooner, so there isn't as much volume? Just a thought...

Originally posted by quakewatcher
Yeah, avalanche danger would preclude using them in this environment, I would think. People are skiing all over the place, it would probably be a bad idea.

Now back to my regularly scheduled totally baseless speculation:

I wonder if we'll see less uniform signals from Lakeway again now that we're seeing big spikes.

Oh heck. They routinely use howitzers to trigger avalanches in and around the ski areas. The news here the other day was about a purposely triggered avalanche at the Jackson ski resort crashing into a few buildings up there, breaking through glass windows and doors, and pushing all of the tables and chairs in one restaurant all up against the other wall.

Luckily, the restaurant was closed at that moment

The avalanche danger has been extreme in the Jackson area for the last few weeks. We get cold and snow, then warm windy weather, then more cold and snow on top of the slippery ice layer formed by the last warm windy period. That makes for an easy zone for things to break loose and slip.

But there is no commercial downhill skiing in Yellowstone. Some cross country skiing, of course, but I believe they require you to stay to known trails or to file a plan. So they'd know where everyone is supposed to be.

It would be easy to avoid creating an avalanche danger to anyone and still be able to do a LOT of shaking up there. Keep in mind that the area is huge.

Anyhow, I'm not saying that this IS what's happening.

It's just one possibility that makes more sense, given the look of the signals, than a geyser.

It would be interesting to hear someone who actually knows what's going on explain those signals, of course. We're all just wildly speculating here.

Though it's fitting less perfectly with our predictive pattern than we thought, the chance this is trucks is diminishing.

Originally posted by VX-7R
What about this:

Could the folks up at Yellowstone be using "shaker trucks" to try to map the various underground features in the area, perhaps to see if things are changing shape?

The signals we're seeing on the various seismographs might well be the signals from such shaker trucks being used.

They're big trucks, and people would probably see them moving around in the area. But it'd be easy enough to get a few of them up there and put them to use like this.

Back in the last oil boom around here, I knew a couple of people who worked on crews doing this kind of mapping. This was more acceptable in certain areas than setting off dynamite. It's also faster to set up and move. In an area like Yellowstone, they'd want to be as environmentally sensitive as possible, so to me, shaker trucks make some sense for mapping things underground.

They'd array their trucks in some kind of a pattern or line. Then they'd set them up with hydraulic pads pushing down onto the earth and raising the truck up slightly.

Then they'd synchronize all of the trucks together to a master sync signal via radio link, and start them all up at once. Inside each truck was a huge mass that was coupled to the pad pressed against the ground by very large and powerful actuators.

The masses would all be moved in unison to create the wavefront that was desired, and the data from this would be recorded by an array of "geophones" that they'd deploy.

At the time, the bottleneck was the computing power required to process and analyze the data from the geophones to create an image of what lies below ground. That was always a big part of the proprietary IP that these companies used.

These days, I'd expect that end of things to be much more sophisticated and the processing to be much faster.

Anyhow, the idea of shaker trucks just comes to mind when I see those patterns that we're calling "secret geysers" on this thread.

It'd explain the very uniform and controlled appearance of the amplitude of the signals we're seeing.

Thoughts?

Would we see the consistant inverse correlation between duration and interval we are seeing if it was shaker trucks?

Originally posted by littleflower

Would we see the consistent inverse correlation between duration and interval we are seeing if it was shaker trucks?

That's a good question. I'm not sure how you'd set things up for a study of that sort. I know very little about the actual practice of doing mapping with such a system.

But I suspect that they've got to fire off a burst, then wait for the echoes to be recorded, then continue. I can envision all kinds of regimes for mapping to different depths or trying to focus the waves they generate onto various targets to try to probe different underground features, etc.

It'd be like the acoustic equivalent of synthetic aperture radar, using a phased array of these little remotely deployed shaker gizmos.

The possibilities are so vast that I don't think you could rule out any kind of pattern to what you might see.

Classic case of not enough information followed by wild speculation (on my part).