Dark Earth

Volcanoes and earthquakes heard as one resonating body built from the ground's own modes, starting with the Svartsengi eruption sequence on the Reykjanes peninsula, 2023–2026.

IMO's lava-flow and effusion data is not part of this build.

The timeline zooms through five levels, from the whole sequence to a few minutes. What you hear is one resonating body. Its 36 modes are built from the ground's own movement in each eruption cycle: the three GNSS stations' motion, transposed up into hearing. A comb, tuned from the cycle, is the room it rings in. The magma's inflow bows it, and each eruption strikes it. The earthquakes of IMO's catalogue are the Swarm. At the hours and minutes levels you also hear the MELH seismometer itself, the Ground, played 250 times faster than real time. The sound starts at your first click or key press. Press L for the legend: hold a chip to hear one quantity on its own.

Credits

• Data: the Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO, Veðurstofa Íslands): its earthquake catalogue, the GNSS stations SKSH, SENG and THOB, and the MELH seismometer. Compiled and shared by Leif Karlstrom (Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oregon; Volcano Listening Project), with whom this design is made.
• Built with DarkSonification. Designed by Miguel Angel Crozzoli; implemented with Claude AI agents.

Data

• Earthquakes. IMO earthquake catalogue (Svartsengi polygon), located + magnitude-estimated by IMO.
• GNSS. daily N/E/U, IMO stations SKSH, SENG, THOB (files *_060423_092426_I.csv).
• Seismometer. RK.MELH.10 HH* 100 Hz + LM* 1 Hz miniSEED, 2024-01-14 00:00-10:23 UTC, raw counts.
• Coastline. Natural Earth 1:10m land, public domain.

What the data can and cannot say (export of 2026-10-20T21:41:01.340Z, contract 0.11.7):

• station coordinates pending StationXML / FDSN station service (MELH, SKSH, SENG, THOB)
• waveforms are raw counts (no instrument response yet)
• MELH covers 2024-01-14 00:00-10:23 UTC only; the station was overrun by lava
• GNSS straight-line (interpolated) days are flagged <ST>_interp; all three stations are interpolated across the 14 Jan 2024 eruption
• GNSS 1-2 day excursions that return are flagged <ST>_spike
• deflation events are detected by this project; Leif's eruption timeline will replace them
• fc_hz assumes a 3 MPa stress drop and treats ML as Mw
• eq_b uses one whole-catalogue Mc (max curvature)

Sound engine

The sound is made by SuperCollider running inside this page: its synthesis server (scsynth) and its language (sclang), compiled to WebAssembly. They run the design's own SuperCollider files, the same ones the desktop version plays: the SynthDefs, the cooking and the message parser. Two things differ from the desktop, both in how data reaches the engine. The engine cannot read files, so those files are included in the code it runs. The seismometer's samples are sent to it from the page, block by block, as the desktop's bridge does.

Software and licences

• SuperCollider, WebAssembly build from the development branch at commit 5d47207 (unreleased). scsynth and sclang: GPL-3.0; the WebAssembly bindings: AGPL-3.0. Unmodified; the licence text is in engine/LICENSE.
• D3 v7.9.0 (ISC licence).

Built 2026-10-21 01:07:29. ← back to Dark Earth