Making the map about seismic vibration
Professor Kang Tae-Seob
Professor Kang Tae-Seob is one of a few domestic scientists who are studying about earthquake. He said that we need to prepare for the earthquake so hard as it causes indirect damage to various field. If it affects to infrastructure such as KTX, subway, highway, nuclear power plant, or IT facilities, it will bring huge damage to people. Unfortunately, we can’t prepare a thing before the earthquake happens because we can’t guess where it will happen. "The earthquake happens because power from inside of the earth applies to rocks and it causes destruction with the power piled up more than its limitation. We can’t not see where the power applies, so it is hard to know where the destructions start," he said. He said that it is impossible to expect where it would happen, but he can guess how to act when the earthquake happens.
He tries to read inner structure of the earth with background noise of earthquakes what nobody focuses on. He found the characteristic that the progress of wave gets faster or slower when it’s spread as he guesses that these noises would have the information about the inner structure of the earth and analyzes correlation about signaling of observation stations. Therefore, he succeeded to visualize the inner structure of the earth with background noises of earthquakes as the first in Korea. "We can predict the beginning point, way, speed, and size of the earthquake as we know the inner structure of the earth," he said. He is running ’Shake Map Project’ with researchers in Seoul National University. It is making the map about seismic vibration. It is seismic technique business ordered by the Meteorological Administration. The map will let people know that how much they can feel in each area of Korea when the earthquake happens. When this map is completed, people would know where the vibration is the biggest and where the ambulances and fire trucks should go first, so we can react fast when it happens.