Tiltmeter studies in earthquake prediction

Abstract

Our knowledge is still very limited as to the way in which the Earth's surface deforms around active faults and why it does so. By far the easiest method of providing clues to the mechanisms involved is to record the associated pattern of tilt of the Earth's surface. tilt measurements give us a means of monitoring vertical displacements or local uplift of the crust. The simplest type of tiltmeter is a stationary pendulum (fig. 1). As the Earth's surface distorts locally, the pendulum housing is tilted while, of course, the pendulum continues to hang vertically (that is, in the direction of the gravity vector). The tilt angle is the angle through which the pendulum housing is tilted. The pendulum is the inertial reference (the force of gravity remains unchanged at the site), and tilting of the instrument housing represents the moving reference frame. We note in passing that the tiltmeter could also be used to measure the force of gravity by using the pendulum in the same way as Henry Kater did in his celebrated measurement of g in 1817.