Felts reports can shake response to earthquakes

Where the earth trembles, the internet lights up. People reach for their phones to search for information and tell others what they’ve been through. Many seismological agencies require “felt reports,” and scientists are now trying to use these reports to increase safety in areas where seismographs are scarce.

Seismologist Henning Lilienkamp of the GFZ Helmholtz Center Potsdam and colleagues recently investigated whether they could use the felt reports alone, collected through an app called LastQuake, to determine if an earthquake was high impact.

“The biggest problem with responses is getting the information as quickly as possible.”

Felt reports are nothing new, but they are usually used in conjunction with data from seismographs. For example, reports compiled by the USGS through its website Did You Feel It? Among the multiple data sources used to create the maps are ShakeMaps, which describe the intensity of earthquakes.

Instead of replacing existing systems that detect and classify earthquakes, “our idea is to be a little bit faster” while providing a very raw view of what happened, Lillenkomp said. Their model could one day be the basis of a system that advises emergency responders on whether they should respond immediately to earthquakes (red light), investigate further (yellow), or do nothing (green).

The current work is only a starting point, but the researchers are excited about the eventual applications of the felt reports. “A lot of the problem with the responses is getting the information as quickly as possible,” said seismologist Rachel Abercrombie of Boston University.

Existing systems face limitations

LastQuake is one of three types of crowdsourced data — along with Twitter and traffic to their website — that the Euromed Seismological Center uses to detect earthquakes.

The app’s 1.4 million users, as well as visitors to the site, can report shaking by clicking on one of twelve illustrations that describe different levels of severity. A very slight shake is depicted as two happy people watching TV, while a serious earthquake is depicted as terrifying cartoon characters writhing in the street as buildings collapse.

Lilienkamp and colleagues took these imputed reports a step further by using them to calculate the probability that an earthquake will be severe (defined as destroying at least one building, damaging at least 50 structures, causing at least two deaths, or causing any financial damage). documented losses).

Researchers have not been able to reliably identify high-impact earthquakes. However, all of the earthquakes that their model identified under a 1% probability of being high-impact were in fact low-impact events, indicating that the system can be used to identify some situations that do not require a response.

The fact that high-impact earthquakes are rare presents an inherent difficulty in studying them, said seismologist Mostafa Mousavi of Stanford University. Most of the events Lilenkamp and his colleagues analyzed were low-impact earthquakes, Moussaoui said, making the model more likely to detect those events — and it could sometimes be wrong. He added that systems based solely on physical reporting could be valuable, but it was “a difficult problem”.

Abercrombie said that if tactile reporting can help emergency responders quickly get where they need to be, the idea is worth pursuing. “If you’re trying to save people alive, it’s much easier in the beginning.”

When high-impact earthquakes occur, usually, there is no question whether assistance is needed. These events often produce what’s called a donut effect: a ring of abundant reporting far from the epicenter, explained seismologist Ina Cicic of the Slovenian Environment Agency, with only sporadic reports of where the most damage occurred. Recent earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria produced this pattern, Lillenkamp said.

Even the uncertain suggestion that an earthquake warrants attention can sometimes be helpful. Lillenkamp pointed to the June 21, 2022 earthquake in Afghanistan as an example. The region has few seismic instruments, so scientists from the Euro-Mediterranean Seismological Center were initially unable to find out if the earthquake affected the population. “It turns out that more than a thousand people died,” Lillenkamp said. LastQuake received 50 reports—the minimum needed to run the model—in about 8 minutes, and the model likely indicated that the response was justified.

Many paths ahead

The felt data was “how seismology really got started.”

Cicic said the Welt reports are just one of the ways seismologists use high- and low-tech tools to make it easier to detect earthquakes. For example, Japan, Mexico, and parts of the United States have services that alert people of nearby earthquakes before the tremors reach them. Google offers a similar service that relies on data from the accelerometers built into Android phones. Meanwhile, cheap, easy-to-use seismographs called Raspberry Shakes are replacing expensive seismometers in many parts of the world.

Adding concrete reports to this arsenal, Mousavi said, is a modern revival of “how seismology actually began.” Long before seismic instruments existed, people recorded their experiences with earthquakes on whatever media was available. As reporting apps become more diverse and more widely used, a return to more intuitive devices could be the key to increasing security around the world.

—Shaima Mai Siddik (@saimamaysidik), science writer

Citation: Siddig, SM (2023), Felt Reports Can Shake Earthquake Response, Ios, 104, https://doi.org/10.1029/2023EO230147. Posted April 11, 2023. Text © 2023. Authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 Unless otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without the express permission of the copyright owner is prohibited.

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