As the world quieted down in 2020, Raspberry Shakes listened
Enlarge / Every time we come across another cool Raspberry Pi project (like the Raspberry Shake 4D, pictured here) we're reminded of how we need to buy like 20 of these things. (credit: Mike Hotchkiss, Raspberry Shake)
It's the trains!" Ryan Hollister yelled to his wife Laura as he burst into their home in Turlock, California. For two weeks in 2017, they'd been staring at data from their newly installed Raspberry Shake, a Raspberry Pi-powered instrument that detects how the ground moves at a specific location. Expecting to see the tell-tale wiggles of distant earthquakes, they instead saw peculiar cigar-shaped waveforms at regular intervals. The biggest challenge," says Laura Hollister, was the noise."
I thought it was the toilet flushing or the washing machine," says Ryan Hollister, but simple tests of going to the restroom or doing the laundry proved him wrong. While stuck in his car watching a train rattle through Turlock, he realized the three tracks that criss-cross this small California town could be causing this mystery seismic noise. As soon as he got home, he pulled up the Raspberry Shake's data. Sure enough, each weirdly intense caterpillar of seismic waves corresponded to a train, with the highest-amplitude waves correlating with the nearest track's schedule, only a half mile from home.
It wasn't the last time that their seismic listening device picked up signs of human activity. As COVID-19 engulfed our world, the Hollisters, a husband-wife team of Earth science educators, noticed that their Raspberry Shake registered much lower levels of activity than usual. The drop was pronounced at times when their street, a main artery to the local high school, should have been pulsing with teenagers.
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