Scientists used earthquake sensors to track a meteor as it zipped across the Alaskan sky in broad daylight.
March 25, 2026
Original Paper
Multi-Sensor Trajectory Reconstruction of the 24 April 2025 Alaska Fireball and Implications for Planetary Defense
arXiv · 2603.22630
The Takeaway
Because daytime fireballs are often invisible to optical cameras, researchers repurposed a dense network of seismic and infrasound stations to 'hear' the rock's entry. This allowed them to calculate the meteor's speed and energy, proving we can monitor space debris in remote regions using ground vibrations.
From the abstract
On 24 April 2025 at 18:30:57 UTC, a bright daytime fireball over Southcentral Alaska was detected by 37 seismic stations, 16 single infrasound sensors, and four infrasound arrays, yielding 30 ballistic and multiple fragmentation arrivals. The unprecedented density of seismoacoustic coverage enabled detailed reconstruction of the event using acoustic signals, with fragmentation source locations further guiding the identification of Doppler weather radar signatures of a meteorite fall. Incorporati