CWU professor got creative as Cascade volcanoes rumbled

CWU Geological Sciences Professor Walter Szeliga received some well-deserved attention for his unique approach to detecting seismic activity this month when he was featured by a northern California news organization.

An August 10 report on SFGATE.com — which serves San Francisco Bay Area — highlighted Szeliga’s seismology research after significant volcanic activity was recorded on Mount Rainier and other Cascade Range volcanoes in early July.

As the article explained: “What began as a few faint tremors soon escalated into the most intense earthquake swarm ever recorded at the iconic 14,410-foot volcano in Washington state, sending over a thousand small quakes rippling through its core over the following weeks.”

The flurry of minor tremors didn't result in any sort of eruption at Mount Rainier National Park, the article continued, but scientists reported that the swarm of 1,172 seismic events likely occurred because “a minor change in the hydrothermal system caused either stress changes or fracture weakening triggering the flurry of small earthquakes.”

Szeliga employed the use of ambient piano music to help others understand what was happening under the earth’s surface. When the swarm of volcanic activity hit, he began studying incoming GPS data to look for permanent changes in geography around the mountain that would suggest there was magma coming into the volcano.

Once it was determined that an eruption was unlikely, Szeliga sought to transform the swarm into music. Over a couple of mornings, he converted the seismic wave recordings into peaceful piano notes, creating a dynamic but calming audio record of the swarm.

Specifically, Szeliga managed to make an audio map of the earthquakes’ depths and relative strengths — the lower the note, the deeper the earthquake was, with louder notes representing the most powerful quakes.

“The thing I was most interested in was how quickly the earthquakes were happening compared to how quickly they were happening during a similar swarm in 2009 and whether you could hear them sort of tailing off,” Szeliga told SFGATE.com.

The two tracks, both published in Szeliga's SoundCloud account, tell the tale of two very different events. The 2009 swarm sounds calmer, with more gradual crescendos and decrescendos to the volcanic activity. The 2025 track is a bit more intense — the activity never fully lets up, and there are several strings of louder notes.

Szeliga is currently working with CWU Music Professor Mark Samples to notate his earthquake tracks and create sheet music that can be played. They are making progress, although there are a few rhythms that have been hard to put on paper.

He's also researching how this endeavor could become an alternative means of presenting data to the public. He said he'll report his findings to the American Geophysical Union later this year.