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London Fuel Tank Explosion Recorded by Short-period Seismic Stations at 500-km Distance

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

	INTRODUCTION

 
On Sunday, 11 December 2005, at about 6 AM UTC, several explosions rocked one of the five largest fuel depots in the United Kingdom, approximately 40 km north of London in Buncefield, Hertfordshire. Some media sources claimed that the resulting fire was the largest in peacetime Europe. A handful of families were temporarily homeless because of the fire, and many more residents within a three-mile radius of the Hemel Hempstead site saw their homes damaged. The blast also destroyed part of the Luton Airport terminal, and the oil fire sent thick clouds of black smoke over London and South England (figure 1). At least one of the blasts was strong enough to wake up residents in west London.

Within a range of 300 km the event was well-recorded by the seismic network of the British Geological Survey (BGS) in the United Kingdom (Baptie 2006). A local magnitude of 2.4 was determined by BGS from these records. At larger distances the signal to noise ratio was not sufficient to detect the seismic waves emanating from the explosions due to the weak ground coupling.

Generally, explosions such as these are easily detected at larger distances by the microbarographs of infrasound arrays, which measure the change in air pressure in the subaudible frequency range (i.e., http://www.geology.smu.edu/~seismic/infrasound/index.html). Most of the current infrasound stations around the globe have been installed under the framework of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) International Monitoring System (IMS). The infrasound signals are an important addition to seismic recordings in order to discriminate explosive blasts from tectonic events. For example, several infrasound stations in the Netherlands recorded clear signals from the explosions near London (http://www.knmi.nl/VinkCMS/news_detail.jsp?id=30073).

The infrasound acoustic waves, which travel through the atmosphere, can themselves induce coupled ground motions; these . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Earthquake Geology Division
Cologne University
Vinzenz-Pallotti-Str. 26
51429 Bergisch Gladbach, Germany
hinzen@uni-koeln.de