Switzerland seems to have a lot of seismic stations compared to its size

9 comments

1. Probably needed when your neighbors, the mountains, are just waiting to kill you by crumbling.

2. Swiss plateau is a very interesting geological region.

3. Combine geological complexity with world-leading geoscience researchers and solid science funding (all three of which may or may not be interdependent) and you get a dense monitoring network…and this applies to more things than seismological monitoring.

   The federal seismology service is hosted at ETHZ: [http://seismo.ethz.ch/en/home/](http://seismo.ethz.ch/en/home/)

4. The Swiss have a vested interest in keeping tabs on seismic activity. Avalanches and land slides are no joke in such a mountainous region.

5. Well, the Alps exist because the African plate smashes into the Eurasian plate. Then there’s the Upper Rhine Plain which is basically a rift stretching from Basel to Frankfurt.

   Switzerland isn’t that stable, geologically spoken.

6. They are there for the police to detect people doing laundry on Sundays.

7. Well, there are valid reasons:
   https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1356_Basel_earthquake

8. At some point you just run out of other things to spend money on…

9. Probably because CERN could zap us to a new dimension any moment