Hummingbird News Desk
NEW DELHI, 23 JULY: The National Center for Seismology (NCS) will commission 35 new stations by December, taking the strength of seismological network to 150, said Jitendra Singh, Union Minister of Science and Technology.
In a statement laid on the table of the Lok Sabha, he said, the strength of National Seismological Network (NSN) will increase to 150 by December 2021.
It is also planned to strengthen the National Seismological Network further by adding 100 seismic stations in the next 5 years to increase the detection capability of earthquake up to M:2.5 throughout the country.
National Centre for Seismology under Ministry of Earth Sciences, is the nodal agency of Government of India (GoI), for monitoring and to study earthquakes in and around the country. For this purpose, NCS maintains a National Seismological Network (NSN) consisting of 115 observatories spread across the country.
The network is capable of recording any event of M:2.5 and above in and around Delhi, M:3.0 and above for NE region, M:3.5 and above in Peninsular and extra-peninsular region, M:4.0 and above in Andaman region, and M:4.5 and above in border regions.
In order to spatially densify the gap areas and to improve the magnitude detection threshold down to magnitude 3 in the country, 35 new stations have been planned in the country and installation is already in progress, the Minister said.
Responding to a separate question on prediction of earthquakes, Mr Singh said as on today, there is no proven scientific technique available, anywhere in the world, to predict or forecast in advance the occurrence of earthquakes with the reasonable degree of accuracy with regard to space, time and magnitude. No country has the capability of predicting the occurrence of earthquakes in advance.
However, research efforts are made in India and elsewhere for developing an Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) System, to alert people once an earthquake occurs based on the arrival time of P-wave of the Earthquake. The warning time, however, is much shorter and of the order of a few seconds. The robustness and success rate of such warning system are to be assessed thoroughly before the system can be considered for real time operations, he said.
Tags: #NCS #EEW #NSN #35Siesmologicalstations
