Caribbean Earthquakes and Slinky Seismometers

In an early post we wrote about a project where we helped science teachers from around our community build sensitive, yet inexpensive, seismometers based on a kid’s slinky and some neodymium magnets.  Here is the output of three such seismometers from around the world (including ours in the Price Science Commons) all showing the large 7.6 magnitude earthquake in Caribbean Sea last January.  Our seismometer is in our coffee shop so that all of our visitors can see the seismometer in action and begin to understand how they work.