Johns Hopkins University seismologist and planetary scientist Benjamin Fernando was in an Ohio city when the eclipse occurred. "I noticed that all of a sudden everything went really quiet," he recalled. "So I was curious as to whether that was going to be replicated in the seismic data."
Seismic noise generated by human activity can arise from construction and mining operations, crowded concerts or sporting events, and the daily traffic of commuters - any activity that causes the ground to shake.
After analyzing seismic noise levels across April 2024 from several hundred seismic stations, Fernando identified a clear pattern of urban seismic quiet on the darkened day. Noise levels peaked slightly before totality began in a given city, then faded significantly as the sun was completely obscured by the moon, before rising again to slightly above average levels for the month.
The pattern was confined exclusively to cities, not rural areas, that lay directly in the path of totality. Cities even slightly outside that path showed no change. "For example, in New York it was 97% totality, but nothing changed," Fernando noted.
The findings suggest that cities in the path of totality experienced the eclipse as a cultural event significant enough to disrupt the normal rhythms of daily life, and that those cities had sufficient ground-shaking daily activity for its absence to register clearly in the data.
Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 produced one of the most widely studied cases of global seismic quiet linked to human inactivity, reducing anthropogenic seismic noise by 50 percent between March and May of that year. The new eclipse study adds another dimension to the growing field of anthropogenic seismology.
Fernando also suggested the results help counter a persistent misconception. "Folks for whatever reason sometimes push the narrative that eclipses cause earthquakes," he said. "That's definitely not the case, and this is another demonstration of that."
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