The Elephant Seismic
Project
Bruce Thompson
Department of Physics
Ithaca College
Ithaca, NY
Note: This is a preliminary web site. More information will
be added real soon now.
A well written article appeared recently in the Ithacan about this
project. Click
here to see it.
The Elephant Seismic Project has several goals:
Determine the mechanical
characteristics of the elephant legs and body,
Determine the propagation characteristics of the seismic
signals that elephants generate,
Determine whether elephants detect seismic signals.
These investigations can help with elephant conservation programs by
helping humans to understand
elephants' perception of the world,
helping to determine elephant populations especially in the
forest,
providing designs for inexpensive elephant detection devices
for farmers to use as alarms in crop raiding areas.
Here are some pictures of from four fields trips to gather data to
answer these questions.
Student Projects
In June 2001, I traveled with
members of the Elephant
Listening Project to Syracuse, NY and to Hohenwald, TN to make
measurements
of the ground vibrations produced by elephants walking and calling. In
the Fall 2001 and Spring 2002, Jamie de Gregory helped
me
analyse these data to determine the nature of the siesmic signals that
elephants produce.
In Fall 2002 and Spring 2003, Matrika
Bhattarai and I
have been working on improvements in the noise floor of seismic
detectors
by comparing the noise performance of analog amplifiers with a totally
digital system.
In the Summer 2003, Matrika
continued to work on seismic detection hardware. Alex
Williamson joined us and worked on time series analysis of
seismic
and accoustic signals.
Page maintained
by B. Thompson (bthompso@ithaca.edu)
Physics Department (home page)
Ithaca College (home
page)
Last change 11/30/2003