When we first started releasing monthly earthquake counts, polygons were drawn around each of California’s volcanoes and nearby tectonic and geothermal areas.
Therefore, we have to draw more complicated shapes (polygons). For many of California’s volcanoes, it isn’t so simple. There can also be nearby fault zones and geothermal areas that produce a lot of seismicity, but are not good indicators of unrest. In some places, it’s easy to just draw a simple box or circle around a volcano and be pretty sure that whatever earthquake is happening there might be because of the volcano. Obviously, we don’t want to be woken up for earthquakes that are happening far away from our volcanoes, so we create alert boxes around the areas we’re confident have a chance of causing earthquakes that might be a sign of unrest. We set up computer scripts that count up the number of earthquakes and send us alerts that wake us up in the middle of the night. Scientists who monitor volcanoes often rely heavily on automatic detections of earthquakes as one of the first warning signs that a volcano is acting up.
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