The Tevatron as Earthquake Detector

Posted on June 29, 2004 by woit

It seems that the Fermilab Tevatron is a quite sensitive detector for earthquakes. According to the Accelerator Update for yesterday, a small earthquake in Illinois caused the machine to lose its beam and a superconducting magnet to quench. A few hours later, a more significant earthquake in Alaska was quite visible to the Tevatron accelerator operators, and would have caused another quench, but they hadn’t restored the beams yet.

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4 Responses to The Tevatron as Earthquake Detector

  1. Thomas Larsson says:
    July 1, 2004 at 1:09 am

    I think one of the CERN experiments once detected some very mysterious bidayly effect. It turned out to be correlated to the timetable of the Lyon-Geneve express.

  2. Dick Thompson says:
    June 30, 2004 at 11:21 am

    Since you provided the link, I’ve been following the daily updates. What amazes me is that they ever get it to work at all, given the number of interacting super high-tech pieces being run near or at their design envelopes.

  3. Yu says:
    June 29, 2004 at 3:21 pm

    Maybe this can be used as a reason to ask for more funding!

  4. Alejandro Rivero says:
    June 29, 2004 at 2:57 pm

    CERN is sensitive to the level of water in the lake of Geneve.

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