Urban seismic monitoring in Brasília, Brazil.

Urban seismology has gained scientific interest with the development of seismic ambient noise monitoring techniques and also for being a useful tool to connect society with the Earth sciences. The interpretation of the sources of seismic records generated by sporting events, traffic, or huge agglomerations arouses the population's curiosity and opens up a range of possibilities for new applications of seismology, especially in the area of urban monitoring. In this contribution, we present the analysis of seismic records from a station in the city of Brasilia during unusual episodes of silencing and noisy periods. Usually, cultural noise is observed in high-fequency bands. We showed in our analysis that cultural noise can also be observed in the low-frequency band, when high-frequency signal is attenuated. As examples of noisy periods, we have that of the Soccer World Cup in Brazil in 2014, where changes in noise are related to celebrations of goals and the party held by FIFA in the city, and the political manifestations in the period of the Impeachment trial in 2016, which reached the concentration of about 300,000 protesters. The two most characteristic periods of seismic silence have been the quarantine due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and the trucker strike that occurred across the country in 2018, both drastically reducing the movement of people in the city.

The forensic geophysical controlled research site of the University of Brasilia, Brazil: Results from methods GPR and electrical resistivity tomography.

In forensic geophysical research, using controlled experiments assists forensic search practitioners in identifying optimal technique(s) and equipment configuration(s) in different burial scenarios. The objective of the research is to observe the geophysical response to different types of buried wrappings, taking into consideration the influence that the presence or absence of a decomposing body (pig carcass) in a lateritic soil in central-western Brazil can have. In this article, the GPR results are presented after a 15day burial period during the rainy season, and the results of Electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) after a burial period of 6 months during the dry season. The controlled site was built in the research area of the University of Brasília, in a region with soil, typical of the Brazilian savannah. 14 simulated clandestine graves of murder victims were constructed, in which seven pig carcasses were wrapped or covered by: soil (backfill), a plastic bag, a bed sheet, cement block, construction debris, a wooden coffin and hydrated lime, respectively a further seven burials, presenting only the wrappings acted as comparison (control burial). During the GPR survey a 400MHz frequency antenna was used. The resistivity surveys were carried out before and after the burial of the targets with dipole-dipole and Wenner-Schlumberger array configurations, with different spacing of electrodes (1.00 and 0.50m). The comparison between the various scenarios with and without pig carcasses revealed that good reflection events occurred mainly due to the wrappings and that pig carcasses attenuated the GPR signal. Electrical resistivity results showed that the Wenner-Schlumberger array presents a better resolution of the lateral boundaries of the burials, and the dipole-dipole array presents a better sensitivity to heterogeneity of the buried materials. The burials with the pig carcasses wrapped in the various materials presented better resistivity contrasts as opposed to the control burials.