Seismology in Dollar

Welcome to DOLLY.  This is not our school sheep but our DOLLar AcademY seismometer. 

Following several false starts DOLLY now has a home in the Playfair Building and Dollar Academy is up and running as part of the School Seismology Project.  This Project enables schools to detect signals from large earthquakes happening anywhere in the world.

The sheer destructive power of earthquakes has always held a fascination for children. We can capitalise on this natural interest by making use of earthquakes and seismology as a unifying theme to teach a range of basic science concepts.

DOLLY is a major teaching resource which will be used in the Geography Department, especially in the study of Earth Forces.  We will be able to detect world earthquakes using a simple seismometer system and share our data with other schools and stations around the world.

As a multidisciplinary resource we will be linking with the Junior School in Project work and it will also be used by the Physics Department in the study of the properties of earth waves.

It is a sensitive piece of equipment and will pick up any earth movements including blasts, heavy traffic and building works.  These can be filtered out or recognised by the magnitude.  The first “recording” was when Form IV Geographers tested the sensitivity by jumping on the area near the equipment.

It is an exciting development and we are pleased that, after months of trial and error, it has settled into Dollar Life.