What Happened

, naturally occurring events like earthquakes. In others, we intentionally create waves using things like explosives, providing the opportunity to do imaging in specific areas without needing earthquake. Now, a team of scientists suggests there’s a potential option that sits between waiting for an earthquake and triggering your own seismic event: thunderstorms.

energy carried by thunder enters the Earth’s upper crust, triggering what are termed “thunderquakes.” But, for various physical reasons, the seismic signals are extremely complex, making it difficult to extract clear signals from them. finally constructed a complexity reconstruct the terrain campus.

Why are thunderquakes so hideously complex? It starts with the phenomenon that creates thunder . Lightning creates thunder by forming superheated bubbles of plasma , creating a structure compared to a string of beads. potential to generate an acoustic shock wave, leading to a chain of expanding lightning’s path through the area, which is anything but a straight line. potential to interfere expand. And, a single point, they rapidly expand from there, albeit with decreasing power.

Things don’t get less complex involved. The acoustic strike soft soil, hard rock, various infrastructure, , affect how energy gets transmitted. energy gets converted called Rayleigh waves, where the energy is transmitted as a ’s surface. deeper, forming through some combination of loose material or the underlying bedrock.

Why It Matters

To extract information ’s structure, understand what the seismic waves from a thunderclap would normally look like. Which, to an extent, requires modeling processes. Since each thunderquake unique different locations and conditions, , at best, an approximation. approximation wouldn’t be good enough to generate usable data probably kept people from trying to analyze thunderquakes sooner.

approximation, the team started with a software package called SPECFEM3D Cartesian, which is dedicated to 3D reconstructions of seismic waves. Already, that choice necessitates a few compromises. For example, the software treats the atmosphere as a 3.6 km-thick homogeneous layer, even though the atmosphere near a thunderstorm is anything but. updates events at a frequency that’s slower moving through the Earth-air interface. So, to compensate for that, the researchers simply stretched the top 20 meters 200 meters.

factors plenty of reasons wouldn’t be sufficient to handle real-world data. So, the people who developed it tested it against , using thunderstorms that passed by their campus.

discoveries in seismology realization -optic cables seismometers. And, conveniently, campus has a 4 kilometer seismic sensing running under the campus. And said campus happens to be located in a summer thunderstorms are a regular occurrence.

What Comes Next

netted them 458 well-resolved thunderquakes, confirmed using records ’s National Lightning Detection Network (something I had not realized existed). These quakes were characterized by multiple signals arriving from different altitudes, as you’d expect from a reaching from clouds ’s surface. Once the signals arrived ’s surface, things happened quickly: “The impingement of each bubble onto the ground or environment generates a high-energy impulsive wavelet followed by a decaying wave train dominated by surface-wave content lasting seconds.”

From there, the signal spread out and started to interact with the features campus. , the team identified four “weak zones,” where seismic signals interact materials. These can include sediments, fractured rock, content. campus happens a karst formation, slowly altered limestone bedrock, potentially creating a variety .

, confirm actually have something unusual . a mixture measured surface deformation, engineering surveys, boreholes , and independent seismic data.

researchers confidence that, despite all the approximations it required, performing reconstructions that are sufficiently accurate to obtain informative seismic data. And the thunderquakes have a number of advantages, including their relative frequency , ’ reconstruction closest to the surface, almost infrastructure is located.

So, this definitely appears to be a a model that’s wrong, but also useful.

Science Advances, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aeg8096 (About DOIs).

Explore more: Software & AI Guide