Making earthquake waves audible to the human ear : BBC Radio 4's The Listeners programme

BGS seismologist Dr Brian Baptie contributed to the BBC Radio 4 programme The Listeners broadcast on 28/2/2013. The programme visited the BGS seismic monitoring station beneath the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, where Dr Baptie explained how seismic waves produced by earthquakes can be recorded and speeded up to make them audible to the human ear. He used a recording from Japan of the magnitude 9 Tohoku earthquake of March 2011 to demonstrate this, along with a recording of a magnitude 5.4 earthquake from North Wales in 1984.