LESSINES (BE)

Quarry blast27 October 2026

Magnitude
1.4ML
Depth
–
Belgian time
14:50:202026-10-27
UTC
13:50:202026-10-27

Main parameters

Date and time2026-10-27 13:50:20 UTC
2026-10-27 14:50:20 Belgian time
MagnitudeML 1.4
Epicentral coordinates50.713° N, 3.845° E
Uncertainty ± 23.9 km
Event IDROB 27590

Data source : ROB (Royal Observatory of Belgium)
Last update : 2026-10-30 13:39:56 Belgian time

Location map

  • Epicentre
  • Station that recorded the event

Arrival times at the stations

Each station first records the P wave, the fastest, then the S wave. The farther a station is from the epicentre, the later the waves reach it and the wider the gap between the two.

Stations
10
Epicentral distance
0.3 – 147.4km
Mean velocity, P wave
5.4km/s
  • P wave
  • S wave
  • Curve fitted to the measurements
Notes and method

Curves: travel time of a direct wave in a homogeneous medium. The velocity of each wave and an origin-time shift, common to both, are fitted to the measurements by least squares. Depth not determined: hypocenter placed at the surface for the calculation. P wave: 9 measurements, root-mean-square deviation 0.44 s.

Stations farther than 120 km are left out of the fit: the first waves to reach them have travelled beneath the crust, through the mantle, where they propagate faster.

Table of measurements

Seismograms

Vertical ground motion recorded by the stations, from top to bottom by increasing distance from the epicentre. The P and S lines mark the measured arrivals.

Passband
Sound
  • P-wave arrival
  • S-wave arrival

Draw a rectangle on the chart to enlarge an area; double-click to return to the full view.

Loading signals…

Notes and method
  • Vertical component of the seismometers; accelerometers are not plotted. Before display, the trend of the signal is removed and a Butterworth band-pass filter is applied in both directions, so without shifting the arrivals. Each trace is scaled to its maximum in the displayed window; that maximum, shown on the right, is the signal divided by the sensitivity of the instrument, without correcting its frequency response.
  • Signals: public archive of ORFEUS (EIDA), networks BE, NL.

Download the signals (miniSEED)

Spectrogram

Distribution of the amplitude of the ground motion over time and frequency, at the selected station, on the vertical and, where possible, transverse component: each column is an instant, each row a frequency, the colour the amplitude in decibels below the maximum, the same for both components.

0 dB
Sound
  • P-wave arrival
  • S-wave arrival
  • Faded areas

Hover to read the time, frequency and amplitude; draw a rectangle to enlarge a time window, also applied to the seismograms; double-click to return to the full view.

Loading signals…

Notes and method
  • Faded areas: the analysis window (filter and smoothing) extends beyond the available signal (edges, gaps, band cut by the digitiser)
  • No transverse component for this station: it is too close to the epicentre for its direction to be reliable (± 89°, beyond 10°).
How to read this spectrogram
  • ReadingLow frequencies are at the bottom, high ones at the top. The stronger the colour, the more the ground moves at that instant and frequency. Before the P wave there is only the station’s background noise.
  • P and S wavesThe lines mark the P- and S-wave arrivals measured at this station. On the transverse component, perpendicular to the direction of the epicentre, the S wave is stronger than on the vertical one, and the P wave, without vanishing, is much weaker than the S wave.
  • Other stationsThe farther the station, the later the waves arrive and the more the high frequencies are attenuated on the way. With the “earthquake” scale, colours compare from one station to another; with the “absolute” scale, from one earthquake to another.
Method and sources

Multiple filter technique (Dziewonski, Bloch & Landisman, 1969), applied in your browser to the raw signal of the station (100 samples per second), the very file of the seismograms above: trend removed, ends tapered over 2 s, spectrum divided frequency by frequency by the instrument response (sensitivity, poles and zeros of the sensor, and digital filters of the digitiser, from the ORFEUS inventory), then, for each of the 81 frequencies from 50 to 0.5 Hz, a Gaussian filter exp(−α ((f − f₀)/f₀)²) with α = 18 and the envelope of the analytic signal; the power (squared envelope) is smoothed in time with a Gaussian whose standard deviation equals the filter’s, √(2α) T₀ / 2π (the smoothing operator of Torrence & Webster, 1999, used by Grinsted et al., 2004), and the displayed amplitude is its square root, the RMS amplitude at the filter’s resolution, free of the fades of the instantaneous envelope; one sample every 0.04 s. Up to normalisation, this is a continuous wavelet transform with the Morlet wavelet, ω₀ = √(2α) = 6, the usual value (Torrence & Compo, 1998). The filter is taken as zero where the digitiser’s anti-alias filter attenuates the signal by more than 80 % (or, when the inventory does not describe it, above 0.8 times the Nyquist frequency); the rows whose filter extends beyond that limit are hatched. Amplitudes in ground velocity, in decibels relative to the station’s maximum; below −40 dB, the background colour.

Colour scale, as chosen: “station”, 0 dB at the maximum of the selected station (vertical and transverse together); “earthquake”, at the maximum of all plotted stations, to compare colours from one station to another; “absolute”, 0 dB at 1 µm/s, from −40 to +40 dB (from 10 nm/s to 100 µm/s), the same on every page, saturated above. The levels are not recomputed: only their mapping to colours changes.

Above each spectrogram, the signal of its component, processed like the seismograms: trend removed, ends tapered over 2 s, 4th-order Butterworth band-pass applied in both directions between 0.5 Hz and the station’s limit, scaled to its maximum in the displayed window; that maximum, written on the right, is the signal divided by the instrument sensitivity, without correcting its frequency response. The time window is shared by the seismograms and the spectrogram.

Transverse component: −E·cos β + N·sin β, β being the back azimuth, the direction from the station to the epicentre (ObsPy convention), computed on the ellipsoid from the instrument position in the ORFEUS inventory; both horizontal components are converted to velocity by their sensitivity before the rotation, then corrected for their common response. It is only computed when the uncertainty on the epicentre location leaves this direction known to within 10°, atan(uncertainty / distance): beyond that, more than 17 % of the radial component, on which the P wave and part of the S wave arrive, would leak into the transverse one. Both components share the same 0 dB.

Computation checked against a second, independent implementation (ObsPy and NumPy) on recordings from the catalogue: instrument response compared with ObsPy’s (evalresp), envelopes and colour levels with NumPy. Response compared with ObsPy’s (evalresp), digital filters included, up to each station’s limit. Signals: public archive of ORFEUS (EIDA), networks BE, NL.

Station measurements

P- and S-wave arrivals and ground displacement measured at each station. Click a column heading to change the order.

km°UTCUTCs
Belgian seismic network (Royal Observatory of Belgium)9 stations
LESLessines0.320813:50:20.46+0.46 s13:50:20.75+0.75 s0.29
SKQSteenkerque18.111313:50:23.23+3.23 s13:50:25.55+5.55 s2.32
RQRRonquières29.411413:50:25.04+5.04 s13:50:29.69+9.69 s4.65
BRQBracquegnies33.014113:50:26.37+6.37 s––
MRDMaredsous79.912513:50:34.83+14.83 s––
DOUDourbes87.014213:50:36.13+16.13 s––
GESGesves95.311213:50:38.62+18.62 s––
CLAClavier108.310713:50:40.26+20.26 s––
RCHRochefort116.212213:50:40.86+20.86 s––
Dutch seismic network (KNMI)1 station
HGNHeimansgroeve147.48713:50:45.46+25.46 s––
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