New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics abstracts

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An anomaly in borehole radon content at Wellington, New Zealand, in 1993

RUSSELL ROBINSON

Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences
P.O. Box 1320
Wellington, New Zealand

Abstract  The radon content of the air in a 60 m deep well at Wellington has been monitored since 1978. The purpose is to test the proposal that anomalous radon content is a precursor to large local earthquakes. The data from 13 January 1990 to 31 July 1994 are homogeneous, free from data gaps, and have been corrected for air pressure and waterlevel changes. During this period there were eight large (magnitude 6.0 or more), shallow (depth <40 km), regional (distance of 800 km or less) earthquakes, but none closer than 172 km. The radon data show only a single anomalous period of 147 days (9% of the observation period) from 17 May to 10 October 1993 when the content was significantly higher than normal. Although two out of eight (25%) of the large, shallow, regional earthquakes occurred during this time, the evidence for a physical connection is weak, since this could happen with probability 0.15 for random earthquake occurrence times.

Keywords  radon; Wellington; earthquake prediction

New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics, 1995, Vol. 38: 395-397

0028-8306/95/3803-0395 $2.50/0 (c) The Royal Society of New Zealand 1995

PDF file of entire paper: medium quality (300K); (scanned from paper original: notes about this process)

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