The Albuquerque Journal published an article that originally appeared in El Defensor Chieftain by reporter John Larson.  The following is an excerpt from the article. Click the link below to read the full article.

A freight train passing through Socorro. EMRTC’s 4th of July Fireworks display. Big trucks rumbling through the area.

Those are just samples of what registers on sensitive earthquake instruments at New Mexico Tech.

Tucked away on a hilltop in the backyard of Tech’s campus is the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology Portable Array Seismic Studies of the Continental Lithosphere Instrument Center — IRIS/PASSCAL for short — the largest facility of its kind in the world.

And what kind of facility is that?

Director Bruce Beaudoin, who supervises the care and handling of seismographic instrumentation, described IRIS/PASSCAL as doing something akin to “a lending library … for seismographs.”

In other words, the seismographs are checked out, at no cost to the users. The only requirement is the data must be publicly available ... 

Click here for the full article at the Journal website