As the novel coronavirus has slowed local and global travel, seismometers have recorded a hush in human activity. Civilization's pulse is barely detectable with the closure of borders and stay-at-home measures limiting people's normal movements. "It did make the scale of the shutdowns a bit more real to me," said Celeste Labedz, a geophysics graduate student at the California Institute of Technology. Labedz said the seismometers showed the human effort to stay at home and limit the spread of the virus in urban areas. Thomas Lecocq, a seismologist at the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels, initiated the experiment to see the effects of the lockdown in his city. Lecocq shared his results on Twitter, finding a remarkable decline in the anthropogenic hiss. "It's crazy," Lecocq said. Cities across the globe found similar results. A seismometer in suburban London registered a 20% to 25% drop in average noise per week, according to Paula Koelemeijer, a seismologist at Royal Holloway, University of London. A separate seismometer near London's center found a reduction of 30%.
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