Fifty years since the first mobile phone call, the technology we carry around in our pocket is helping to create the world's biggest earthquake detection system.
Ednews informs that on 25 October 2022, a 5.1-magnitude earthquake jolted California’s Bay Area. Fortunately, it was more of a than a violent shake, but reports from residents across the region flooded into the United States Geological Survey (USGS) from those who had felt it. There was no damage reported, but the earthquake was significant in another way – many people in the area received alerts on their phones before the shaking started.
More crucially still, many of these phones helped detect the earthquake in the first place, too.
Google has been working with USGS and academics at a number of universities in California to develop an early warning system that alerts users a few seconds before tremors arrive. It is a brief window of warning, but a few seconds can give enough time to shelter under a table or desk. It can also be enough time to slow trains, stop planes from taking off or landing and keep cars from entering bridges or tunnels. As such, this system is likely to save lives when stronger quakes hit.
It uses data from two sources. Initially, the system relied upon a network of the 700 seismometers – devices that detect earth tremors – installed across the state by seismologists at USGS, the California Institute of Technology and University of California Berkeley and the state government. (Seismometers in two other US states – Oregon and Washington – also feed into the system, known as ShakeAlert.) But Google has also been creating what is the world's largest earthquake detection network through phones owned by members of the public.
Most smartphones running Google's Android operating system have on-board accelerometers – the circuitry which detects when a phone is being moved. These are most commonly used to tell the phone to re-orientate its display from portrait to landscape mode when it is tilted, for example, and also helps provide information about step-count for Google's onboard fitness tracker.
