Earth tremor that shakes the planet detected for the first time at its source by Japanese scientists

JAPANESE weather experts have for the first time tracked a vibration which cut through the Earth from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

The rare phenomena was started by a ‘weather bomb’ combining two types of tremors which intertwine as they blast through the planet.

Science boffins have managed to trace the slowest of these vibrations, known as an ‘S wave’, from its source for the very first time.

The findings, which have appeared in the journal Science, could herald a new way of studying the globe’s hidden depths.

According to the BBC, ‘microseisms’ are weather-triggered waves in the fabric of our planet.

These special waves occurs when sea waves collide together during storms sending energy bursting through to the floor of the ocean.

The S waves have finally been detected at their source thanks to a huge suite of special detectors.

The location was traced to a powerful storm located between Greenland and Iceland.

Kiwamu Nishida,  of the University of Tokyo and Ryota Takagi of Tohoku University, used a giant network of 202 stations in southern Japan.

Expert Peter Bromirski, from the University of California San Diego, was not part of the ground-breaking research but co-penned a commentary the issue of Science.

Speaking with BBC World Service, he said: “Most of what we know about the internal structure of the Earth has been determined from studying the way earthquake waves propagate, through the lower crust and the mantle and the core.”

"In order to do that, you need to have a source that can generate a signal that propagates to your seismic stations. For some reason there are very few earthquakes in the mid Pacific... so we don't have any sources there.

"These storm-generated P and S wave microseisms will hopefully allow us to better characterise the structure of the Earth below the Pacific."

David Rotheray, professor of Planetary Geosciences at The Open University, said incredible findings could help improve the detection of earthquakes.

He said: "Knowing we can isolate the signals from storms could be particularly useful because the region where the weather bomb occurred almost never experiences earthquakes."

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