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SIGMA | Scholarship | News | Funding | Contact |
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SIGMA is a new innovative project, which will run for 2 years. SIGMA will use a novel approach towards imaging the spatial and temporal characteristics of aquifers across Malta. Ambient seismic noise is made up of continuous vibrations of the ground surface and shallow rock layers due to natural and anthropogenic sources such as wind, waves and traffic. These vibrations move in all directions as surface wavetrains, whose speed depends on the properties of the rocks through which they pass, including water content. A large data set of such noise is available on stations of the Malta Seismic Network and other temporary instruments, spanning the whole archipelago. The project will use signal processing techniques on this data, mainly cross-correlation of noise between pairs of stations, to extract information about the subsurface, and track temporal and spatial changes in water content at different scales. These changes will be related to in situ borehole readings and meteorological parameters, thus hoping to validate the method as an additional tool for groundwater management. The proposed technique will provide subsurface imaging with much wider coverage than single-point boreholes, as it links all possible station pairs (see figure). It is also cost-effective, since it utilises an ever-present source, and environmentally friendly, being completely non-invasive. |
Coverage from pairs of seismic stations across Malta. Red triangles are stations from the permanent Malta Seismic Network. Orange triangles are from a temporary network FASTMIT deployed between 2017-2018. Blue lines show the potential coverage across the islands. |
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Dr. Sebastiano D'Amico sebastiano.damico@um.edu.mt
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