Radon Monitoring in Soil Gas and Ground Water for Earthquake Prediction Studies in North West Himalayas, India

Abstract

Continuous monitoring of soil gas radon at Sarol and the daily monitoring of radon concentration in water at Banikhet is carried out in Chamba valley of North West Himalayas, India "a well known seismic zone" to study the correlation of radon anomalies in relation to seismic activities of the region. Radon monitoring in soil gas was carried out by using Barasol probe manufactured by Algade France and the radon content in water was recorded using RAD7 radon monitoring system of Durridge Company, USA. The effect of meteorological parameters viz. temperature and pressure on soil gas radon emission has been studied. Correlation coefficient has been calculated between radon in soil gas, soil temperature and soil pressure. The radon anomalies observed in the region have been correlated with the seismic events in the magnitude range 2.2 to 5.0 recorded by Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology Dehradun in NW Himalayan. Empirical equations between earthquake magnitude, epicentral distance and precursor time were examined, and respective constants were determined.

Fractal Analysis of Pre-Seismic Electromagnetic and Radon Precursors: A Systematic Approach

“…It is significant to recognise areas in the signals with distinct changes of the scaling exponent b, since such changes are reported to emerge [10,11,16,17,27,43,44] before or during anomalies in the EM radiation either in the water aquifers or air [27,28]. Noteworthy variations of the concentration of radon and progeny have been observed in geothermal fields [29], thermal spas [30], active faults [31][32][33][34][35], soil experiments [36], volcanic processes [37,38] and seismotectonic environments [16,21,25,27,36,[39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46]. Due to its importance, radon monitoring is also a significant study area in the search of premonitory signals prior to earthquakes [25].…”

“…Most importantly, according to [16,27,43,44] , the radon anomalies of the earthquake 33 of Table 2, were not detected only with active techniques but also through passive ones. It is significant to note also, that in the radon related earthquake literature, the methods that are used for processing the radon signals are, mostly, statistical or visual [46,[75][76][77][78][79].…”

Spatio-temporal Identification of Regions with Anomalous Values of 222Rn in Groundwater of Madurai District, Tamilnadu, India

“…The system attains the state of equilibrium when no more 222 Rn can be extracted from the water, and this process persists for 5 min. More than 95 % of available 222 Rn in water is removed before the state of equilibrium (Singh et al 2010).…”

Assessment of Sensitivity Zone of Radon and Temperature Measurements in Study of Process of Tectonic Earthquakes Preparation

“…While using various methods of studying the changes in the geodynamic state of the Earth's crust, which allow in some cases predicting seismic [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] and volcanic [17][18][19][20][21][22] events, the question of their long-range action or spatial sensitivity arises.…”