Phones can now issue early warnings of earthquakes. Here’s how to get it.

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San Francisco – Your phone can now warn you before an earthquake hits.

“Be-be-boop! Be-be-boop! Earthquake,” an app rang on my iPhone at 11:42 a.m. on Oct. 25. “Drop, snorkel, hold on, shake in anticipation.”

A magnitude 5.1 earthquake struck about 50 miles away in California’s Silicon Valley. I jumped out of my chair and grabbed a wall. A few seconds later, the ground started to quake.

This feat of personal science and technology is the best example I’ve seen of how smartphones can help protect tens of millions of us from great danger. I’ll show you how to get it.

Known as ShakeAlert, America’s Earthquake Early Warning System was developed by the USGS and its partners to typically give you up to 20 seconds of advance warning before a major shake arrives, or up to a minute in extreme conditions. If you are close to the epicenter, you may not receive much attention – but it may still be enough to protect yourself.

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After nearly two decades in development, ShakeAlert is now operational in California, Oregon, and Washington, where it’s considered to be 83 percent complete. The USGS is considering expanding the system to Alaska next.

ShakeAlert had one of its biggest tests with October’s earthquake, when the system took less than 10 seconds to send out about 2.1 million warnings to Californians like me. Fortunately, there were no reports of serious injuries. For me, a little early warning helped me mentally prepare for what was to come.

The experience also left me wondering: How could a push alert reach my phone faster than it could vibrate? “This is a multi-stage process, and I find it really cool that we can do everything,” says Dave Croker, a member of the ShakeAlert operations team at USGS.

I caught up with Crocker at a USGS field station a few miles from California’s infamous San Andreas fault, where he showed me how the system fits together—starting with your cellphone.

How to get earthquake alerts on your phone

Smartphones have a potential that Crocker says is a game-changer for earthquake safety: They always know your location.

When a USGS field station detects an earthquake starting in one location, its network can calculate other places likely to shake as well. Knowing your location means apps and cell towers can send alerts to phones only where they might be needed.

It’s easy to take smartphones for granted, but the last time San Francisco was hit by a major earthquake—in 1989—officials could only communicate with people via radio, television, and loudspeakers.

Today, the USGS does not send ShakeAlerts messages directly to phones. Instead, it generates the information and then lets partner apps and cellular carriers deliver warnings. (There is hope in the future that alerts could go directly to internet-connected speakers and smoke alarms, automatically instructing trains and elevators to slow or stop.)

If you have an Android phone, you are good to go. Google added ShakeAlert to its operating system in 2020 after the California portion came online for the first time. Warnings pop up automatically on your phone’s lock screen, as long as location services and emergency notifications are enabled. These alerts are set to reach earthquakes of at least magnitude 4.5 and are also expected to produce significant shaking in your location. (If severe shaking is expected, Android will send a special alert to take action.)

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If you’re using an iPhone, there’s more work involved. You’ll need to download and run a free app like MyShake, made by UC Berkeley, or QuakeAlertUSA, made by Early Warning Labs. Unfortunately, you will have to repeatedly give the app permission to know your location at all times. (Apple, which has been heavily touting other iPhone security features, said it didn’t have anything to share about integrating earthquake alerts into iOS.)

No matter what kind of phone you use, ShakeAlert can still find its way to you in the event of an earthquake of magnitude 5 or higher. For areas that are also likely to exceed a high vibration threshold, wireless carriers are equipped to automatically send warnings to each phone using an emergency system similar to Amber Alerts. You just need to activate government alerts in your phone settings.

Where do earthquake warnings come from?

So how do they detect that there is an earthquake on your way?

Crocker asked the USGS to meet him on a small patch of land on the west side of San Francisco Bay. There, he opened a green chest pinned to the ground.

Inside are two motion sensors that look nothing like the seismometers you shot with bouncing needles. One is a professional version of an accelerometer (like we have in our phones) that can measure very violent vibration, and the other is a speed sensor that detects very small vibrations.

Powered by a nearby solar panel and battery, these sensors send their readings to the USGS mainframe computers 24 hours a day. That connects them to a network of about 1,400 other sensor stations up and down the West Coast. In densely populated and known seismically active areas such as the Bay Area, it occurs every 3 to 6 miles. But Crocker says the system also needs to be geographically distributed to work. “The Earth never reveals all its secrets – we still have earthquakes in places that we’re not sure will happen,” he says.

When the sensors report a significant vibration, some serious math begins on the USGS computers. First, they determined the magnitude and location of the earthquake — triangulating readings from multiple sensors to eliminate false alarms.

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Then they use these clues to estimate where the shaking occurred. “It took a lot of very clever people to figure out how to convert the magnitude into an estimated ground-shake intensity level quickly enough that it could tell which area we’re sending the alert to,” Crocker says.

It solves numbers in less than five seconds, and then USGS partners transmit warnings online and through cellular data signals at the speed of light.

The system is effective because long-range seismic waves travel through the rock relatively slowly — velocities can reach 1.9 miles per second. That’s why the farther you are from the epicenter, the more warning you’ll receive.

But you still need a plan for what to do when you see this alert. Forget the adage about going under the hallway, Crocker says. Instead, emergency officials say you should fall and grab onto something hard like a wall, and cover your head to protect from any falling debris.

Your mobile phone can really save your life – if you’re ready.

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