More advanced earthquake warning, even under the ocean

Ultra-sensitive gravity sensors in development for satellites orbiting Earth and Mars may also be able to provide up to 30 seconds of advance warning of large earthquakes, scientists say, even if those earthquakes occur under the ocean, where current early warning systems can’t detect about it immediately.

Conventional warning systems use seismometers located as close to fault zones as possible, where they can intercept seismic waves traveling toward populated areas. But these waves travel at a limited speed (usually 4 to 6 kilometers per second), and are undetectable until they reach the nearest seismographs.

For marine earthquakes, such as massive earthquakes that can occur in sea trenches, tens of seconds can be lost, which greatly reduces the potential warning time. In coastal communities, the most destructive part of these seismic waves may be practically upon them before the first such warning is issued.

The new system, under development at the University of Maryland in the US, takes advantage of the fact that strong vibrations from earthquakes not only shake the Earth. They move rocks as they move – in the process they create subtle changes in Earth’s gravitational field.

“Any movement of the mass will change the gravitational field around it, and the earthquake moves the mass around,” says Jean-Paul Ambero, a seismologist at the University of Côte d’Azur, France.

For more information on earthquake warning systems, read: Tracking Earthquakes Deep in the Earth

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Those changes are small, but with new, highly sensitive instruments being developed for NASA’s spacecraft, Ambero’s colleague Ho Jong-Baik said last week in Bellevue, Washington, at a meeting of the American Seismological Society, that they could be detected almost instantly from a range of up to About 120 km, even if it is far from the shore.

This is enough to give an additional warning of up to 30 seconds. This may not sound like much, but most injuries occur when people move when the trauma first occurs, Sarah McBride, a sociologist with the US Geological Survey in Los Altos, California, said at the same meeting. The thirty-second warning, she said, is plenty of time to fall to the ground, looking for cover from falling objects, and preparing for what’s to come.

The new instrument, which is still under development, is called SEED (Superconducting Earthquake Early Warning Device). It will use a set of magnetically levitated niobium cylinders, each weighing about 10 kilograms, separated by about one meter, and cooling to 4.2 degrees Kelvin (-268.95 degrees Celsius).

By using currents flowing through superconducting coils surrounding these cylinders, Pike says, these cylinders can be used as accelerometers that can quickly detect minute changes caused by the passage of gravitational waves caused by an earthquake. They can also detect which direction these gravitational waves originated from.

To be clear, the instrument will not be used on orbiting satellites. It is simply derived from something Paik’s team is helping develop for NASA. It cannot be published worldwide. Not only is it expensive, but it requires a cryogenics capable of maintaining temperatures of 4.2 degrees Kelvin that allow the superconducting coils to function properly.

This means that SEED, once fully developed, will not replace traditional seismometer-based early warning systems. But they can supplement them, especially in high-risk, densely populated areas that are close enough to have serious faults that the extra warning is worth the expense. In the United States, Pike says, he’s looking to collaborate with four major universities: CalTech, UCLA, UC-Berkley and the University of Washington, all of which have refrigeration labs that can easily use the tool, all of which are in the population. Areas close to dangerous malfunctions. Then – who knows?

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