Could Someone in the Know Look at These Helicorder Displays from the Louisiana Sinkhole Area?

Louisiana Sinkhole Seizmos

I have been following THIS site for updates about the sinkhole. The author, and some of his other contributors, have reported very consistent quakes in the area reaching over 3.0. They have also claimed that the area is having harmonic tremors. The USGS has listed few, if any, quakes for southern Louisiana for months--and certainly none in the range that they are claiming. Are these guys full of it, or is all of the helicorder data just normal ground noise from the area--I do not know how to tell the difference.

The most recent displays have a lot of the activity that I am asking about.

reply to post by supertrot


Looks like human activity to me,

I'll post a link back to this thread over in Quake Watch 2012 and see if one of the more knowledgeable posters can take a look and verify that.

Think about it......The sinkhole is growing daily...its now a lake four football fields lARGE......
what do you THNK is going on down there?
Bound to be seismic disturbances underground is have dynamic changes made....

reply to post by supertrot


I can assure you that the signals you see are absolutely nothing to do with the sink hole.

The second I saw the signature I knew what it was - TRAINS. The railway track is a fraction over 2 km from the seismo location.

Approx location of rail track

You can see it running right alongside the road.


ETA: If you have the time and can be bothered you should be able to get hold of timetable and at least match up the passenger trains to the signals. Obviously you will not get a goods schedule.


By the way the ONLY seismos you should be looking at for the sinkhole at the LA seismos. They too suffer from traffic noise by the way. (Smaller versions of those big ones on the other seismo).

Also, HT is long and continuous and NEVER looks like that. Here is HT from El Hierro



Google search harmonic tremor

Click on images and you will see any examples.

There are however many other things that can look like HT on a seismo so if in doubt - ask. The only way HT can be identified properly is to run a Fourier analysis on the signal to extract the harmonics.

reply to post by supertrot


Just to add by the way that Mathews seismo is so far from the sinkhole (472 miles) it would NEVER pick anything up from there. The site may be about the sinkhole but that particular element is not.

Clarification: It would not pick up HT. It would pick up larger earthquakes.

Thanks all for your responses. I have just been hearing that there are numerous quakes in the area and wanted to know if it was true or not. Even some of the parish officials have reported 3 pointers; but, USGS never has. It also makes sense that there should be quakes from the sinkhole collapse. Why are they not showing up on quake maps. I do not agree with the idea that they are not reporting them because the salt dome is a man-made structure; I have seen USGS report quakes that they attribute to mine collapses before.

reply to post by supertrot

Why are they not showing up on quake maps. I do not agree with the idea that they are not reporting them because the salt dome is a man-made structure

USGS do not report all quakes from all areas. Oklahoma is one which they do not report and I believe many of the Nevada quakes do not get posted on the main USGS site BUT these are all available from the Geological Surveys of the various States. They simply could not report every single quake of the lists would way too unwieldy. No conspiracy there, just practicality.

The salt dome itself is not a man made structure. What is man made is the caverns in the salt dome where salt has been extracted by solution mining, or where oil and gas has been extracted from the cavities above or beside the rock-salt.