Superstorm Sandy didn't just shake the East Coast, but a new report released by scientists on Thursday say it also shook the ground across most of the country.
When Sandy took a left turn for Long Island and NYC, powerful ocean waves began slamming into each other and battered the coastline, sending seismometers up and down the US into overdrive.
Keith Koper and Oner Sufri, geologists at the University of Utah, said that the crashing of massive waves against Long Island, New York and New Jersey-as well as waves hitting each other offshore-generated measurable seismic waves across much of the U.S., as far away as Seattle.
The pair spoke during the Seismological Society of America's annual meeting where they shared data from a nationwide network of seismometers to track microseisms, faint tremors that spread through the earth as a result of the storm waves' force.
"They are not earthquakes; they are seismic waves," says Keith Koper, director of the University of Utah Seismograph Stations. "Seismic waves can be created by a range of causes. ... We have beautiful seismic records of the meteor that hit Russia. That's not an earthquake, but it created ground motion."
Koper noted that there's no magnitude scale for microseisms generated by the storm, but did say they ranged from 2 to 3 on the magnitude scale. He said conversion is difficult at best because earthquakes occur over relatively short periods, while the energy from hurricanes last for hours upon hours.
The team also noted that some of the seismic readings came from waves crashing the coast but the bulk came from waves slamming into each other, creating "standing waves" that penetrate downward through the water column to the seafloor, where the energy is released.
