Weighing earthquake waves

High-precision scales have detected teleseismic waves by chance from an earthquake some 3700 km away. The interpretation yields excellent agreement between recordings of the scales and nearby seismographs. Ground displacements at the locality of the scales were determined in the range of 20–420 μm. The comparison of both data sets showed that the scales respond to local ground accelerations in the same way as a long-period seismometer (T0 > 5 s), if observed displacements are larger than 5 μm. For future applications, we suggest to use high-precision scales as additional devices to monitor earthquake waves as well as similar artificial vibrations.