CNN.com - Quake sounds reveal Earth 'ripping apart' - Jul 20, 2005

Ripping Earth...

CNN.com - Quake sounds reveal Earth 'ripping apart' - Jul 20, 2005: ".

'It's really quite an eerie sound to hear the Earth ripping apart like that. We hear it on smaller earthquakes quite frequently but something of this scale that goes on for eight minutes is very much unprecedented,' said Maya Tolstoy, a marine geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

'It really gave me the chills when I first heard it,' she said.

The dramatic soundtrack of the rupture of the Sumatra-Andaman Fault comes from a little known, and sometimes hard- to- access resource. The microphones that captured the sound are part of a global network of instruments that monitor compliance with the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

The microphones that picked up this earthquake were located in Diego Garcia, an island more than 1,700 miles from the epicenter of the quake."