ShakeAlert updated the Pacific Northwest's major earthquake warning

The new earthquake early warning technology has taken more than a decade to implement.

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — As the West Coast waits for the next massive earthquake in the Cascadia Subduction Zone, researchers have devised a new way to identify major quakes and alert the public to take cover.

Since 2021, Oregon, Washington and California have used the ShakeAlert earthquake early warning system, which sends residents a cell phone alert when an earthquake strikes using seismic sensors.

However, researchers were not confident that the system could handle a large earthquake.

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In addition to more than 1,500 seismic sensors that detect ground shaking, the ShakeAlert system now uses sensors that detect ground surface movement using a satellite and has the potential to save more lives in the event of a major event, the U.S. Geological Survey announced Wednesday.

While seismic sensors measure how quickly the ground shakes, satellite sensors measure how much the ground moves up, down or sideways during an earthquake — giving experts more confidence in the system's ability to track earthquakes.

“It's GPS technology, very similar to the one on your phone, but much cooler,” explained Diego Melgar, a professor of earth sciences at the University of Oregon. “It's a special type of GPS sensor that's very, very sensitive. And what this new capability allows ShakeAlert to do is perform very well at dealing with the largest earthquakes. So, think about a magnitude 8 earthquake, a magnitude 9 earthquake , which is the size of the earthquake we would expect to occur in the Pacific Northwest.

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This technology gives experts confidence in the warning system, especially since the West Coast awaits the next Cascadia subduction zone earthquake, expected every 300-500 years. The last major earthquake to hit the region occurred 324 years ago in January.

“We were a little concerned about how ShakeAlert would perform in these really large events. But with this new technology, we're very confident that ShakeAlert will perform really well when there's a very large earthquake,” Melgar said.

“What this update does is it makes ShakeAlert very useful for the Pacific Northwest, and we're now in a position where ShakeAlert users, people on the coasts and in the Oregon Valley, can feel absolutely confident that if you get an earthquake early warning on your phone,” he added: “If you get an alert that says 8.7 magnitude, or something very large like that, you should feel pretty confident that it's because the system is doing a really good job of identifying that event.”

Experts stress the importance of warning systems for identifying large earthquakes, especially after the devastating 9.1 magnitude Tohoku-oki earthquake in Japan in 2011, which killed 19,759 people, according to the EarthScope Consortium, a ShakeAlert partner.

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“Because they were relying only on traditional seismometers, they thought the magnitude of the quake was eight magnitudes, not nine magnitudes. So, they still identified it very quickly, but they underestimated its size,” Melgar said. “This is obviously a problem because the warning is not “It reaches a large number of people, and the tsunami warning was underestimated.”

“Although earthquakes larger than magnitude 7 are rare, they can have a greater impact on human lives and infrastructure,” said Robert De Groot, of the US Geological Survey's ShakeAlert operations team. He added: “Future major offshore earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest, which could be similar to the 2011 M 9.1 earthquake in Japan, underscores the importance of incorporating satellite data streams into the ShakeAlert system.

Melgar believes this is the first time GPS technology has been put into practice to identify large earthquakes for an early warning system, a “triumph” more than a decade in the making.

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“This is a really big development for us in Oregon, Washington and Northern California, because we know there's going to be a big event eventually,” Melgar said. “Now we can feel really good about the fact that the earthquake early warning system will work very well when this big event happens.”

“To get this technology into a real-time system that can send alerts to people on their phones, it took a lot of work by a lot of scientists and engineers. “I think for a lot of people, this is a huge victory,” he added.

While construction of the ShakeAlert seismic sensors is expected to be completed by the end of 2025, Melgar says earthquake early warning systems are always a work in progress. He says the next frontier in earthquake warning is developing marine sensors with stations on the seafloor and using machine learning and artificial intelligence to identify large earthquakes.

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