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‘Bored’ seismologists find a new hobby: Tracking silence

Dallas Morning News

Originally Posted: May 21, 2020

If you’ve been noticing more birds chirping and more frogs singing, it’s probably not your imagination.

Noise created by humans, such as car and truck traffic, quieted by about 30 percent between late March, when Gov. Greg Abbott closed schools and restaurants across Texas, and early May, according to a new analysis by researchers at Southern Methodist University.

“There was quite a big change in some areas,” said Stephen Arrowsmith, a seismologist at SMU, who took on the project with a class of undergraduate and graduate students this spring. READ MORE