Visitors from schools and colleges across the North West have attended an interactive workshop in the Central Teaching Laboratory on earthquake science.
Organised by the Seismology Group within the Department of Earth, Ocean and Ecological Sciences, the workshop was aimed at introducing teachers and students to the importance of understanding active tectonic environments, and demonstrated some of the techniques used in the study of earthquakes giving a taste of what earthquake scientists actually do.
Hands-on activities
The 125 students and teachers worked in teams on a range of hands-on activities including locating earthquakes from seismic data; making models of buildings and using shake tables to test the response of different building designs to ‘earthquake ground movement’; building a seismometer and using radar satellite images to detect faults and fault movements.
Teams were also given an outdoor demonstration of a volcano and were able to see the signals picked up by 24 geophones set out around the site of the ‘volcanic’ explosion.
Isabelle Ryder, from the Seismology Group, said: “It’s great to see the teams working so enthusiastically on the earthquake activities and having so much fun testing their model buildings – to destruction in some cases! We have had such a brilliant response from teachers and their students that we intend to repeat ‘Earthquakes in Action’ next year.”
For more information about ‘Earthquakes in Action’, email Isabelle.
