Stellar Solutions
staff have reviewed over a hundred scientific papers
describing ELF/earthquake correlations, and we feel
that ELF monitoring is an under-exploited, promising
technique for short-term earthquake risk
assessments. We believe the solutions might reside
in continuously monitoring ELF emissions, first form
the ground, then from space.
We feel so strongly about this
that we started by funding, designing, and building
several low-cost ELF monitoring ground stations,
using a proprietary 3-axis antenna capable of
detecting pico-Tesla per root hertz signals. The
system uses a commercial PC and a 1-800-phone links
to keep costs down. We have a also funded and
organized a multi-high school science project to
build an 11-station network of sensors to be
installed along the San Andréa's and Hayward Faults
in the Bay Area. We have one system operating 24 hrs
per day for over a year, and the remaining systems,
should be on line by the late fall of 2000. A
large-scale, ground-based network, built to monitor
the major fault zones in northern California was
just funded by the State of California (CSTA Grant),
and will allow us to build and deploy 40 additional
units, with a monitor deployed every 20 miles, near
the faults. This high school science project is demonstrating
that civilians (schools) can be considered a
reliable, low-cost, year valuable part of a large,
data gathering research project. We used China as a
model, where they have more than 10,000 civilians
gathering earthquake data today.
We now feel that it is time to
consider a space-based ELF monitoring system to
augment the limited ground-based system being
built. The promising results of the early
Cosmos and Aureol ELF monitoring, and the
availability of low cost satellites and
"piggyback" launch opportunities, make it
practical to fly an ELF sensor on a satellite to perform
world-wide monitoring of these earthquake
signals.
