The Open Seismometer Network as a Collaborative P2P Infrastructure that is Scalable, Distributed and Robust

Modern seismic networks have taken upon the crucial task of identifying geological risks to our increasingly dense civilization. Unfortunately, risk prevention and mitigation are still pending issues in many regions, specially in developing countries prone to geological disasters. This lack of proper monitoring infrastructure has been traditionally caused by the elevated costs of seismic equipment, mainly sustained due to commercial interests for its use in the oil&gas industry.

With the advent of the Open Seismometer design with performance comparable to state-of-the-art broadband stations, there is now the possibility to vastly increase seismic monitoring density in previously underrepresented regions. However, there were still unavoidable complexities regarding sensor deployment and infrastructure requirements that in practice limited their use to experts and large organizations.

We propose a new approach for a public Open Seismometer Network that simplifies the steps needed to deploy these optimized stations. The technical complexities of seismic infrastructure can be minimized now there is a base open-source seismometer design, as calibration is similar between units, and improvements are easily transferred back to all stations. Also, by leveraging open-source seismic software and P2P internet communication protocols it is possible to provide a distributed and scalable service without depending on a single server. And additionally, the transition to modern seismic formats such as Mseed3 and the cost of maintaining legacy Mseed2 streams can be simplified and reduced through an efficient data distribution and network design.

Building on open-source seismic solutions such as RingServer, combined with a novel P2P architecture, can finally provide a unified Seedlink service that transparently englobes a network of interconnected and independent servers. This enables field recovery of seismometer data in a reliable way, and at the same time can provide the real-time waveforms to a large body of users.

In today’s big-tech world, where it seems every technological solution is pushed to become a centralized subscription service, we believe it is specially crucial to make a stand and design a truly open seismic research environment. For this, the Open Seismometer Network aims to bridge the gap between novel low-cost seismic instrumentation and effective seismic networks.