New effort from Google uses cell phones to detect earthquakes | Science

The 7.8-magnitude Kaikoura earthquake in 2016 destroyed highways and foothills in New Zealand’s South Island.

Reuters / Anthony Phelps

By Paul Vossen 28, 2021, 1:00 PM

Google is leading the way in saving lives. The internet giant announced today that Android phone users in New Zealand and Greece will receive warnings of devastating earthquakes about to hit their sites. And those earthquakes will be detected not by the usual seismographs, but by the phones themselves.

Earthquakes are a known threat in both countries. In New Zealand, the Pacific Plate collides with the Australian plate and its regular grinding causes major earthquakes, including the 2011 shock in Christchurch that killed nearly 200 people. Greece is spread across three tectonic plates, with destructive earthquakes occurring almost annually. Neither country has published a working warning system. That created an opportunity to make a difference, says Mark Stugaitis, lead project engineer at Google. “We have two big problems that we want to solve: detect earthquakes as quickly as possible and send alerts as quickly as possible.”

These earthquake early warning systems take advantage of a simple fact: The speed of light travels over fiber-optic cables to the Internet faster than earthquake waves. Conventional warning systems use seismometers to detect the size and magnitude of an earthquake, then transmit a warning, via a smartphone or loudspeaker, to residents who are likely to sense an earthquake. Such warnings, even if they come just seconds before the earthquake, can give people enough time to fall to the ground, shelter under a desk, or hold out until the shaking stops. These systems are powerful, but they are difficult and expensive to develop. One of the systems, known as ShakeAlert, took 15 years to build and deploy in California, Oregon, and – starting next week – Washington state. It cost $ 60 million to build and takes more than $ 30 million a year to operate.

Men-Andrin Meier, a seismologist who studies earthquake warning systems at ETH Zurich, says that an earthquake warning system that can forego these expenses and rely instead on smartphones has huge potential globally. “If you can only do this with phones, via Google, that’s a colossal shortcut.”

Phone-based network is possible because modern devices are equipped with accelerometers that monitor movement, such as when a user picks up or turns a phone. But these motion sensors can also be programmed to act as rudimentary seismometers, to detect the characteristic vibration induced by pressure and shear waves induced by earthquakes. But getting users to download apps that would make such phone-based networks successful has been a challenge. So Google’s interest in building earthquake-sensing capabilities directly into more than 2 billion active Android phones, downloaded in a standard system update, presents a huge opportunity, says Richard Allen, a seismologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “For us, it was a complete brainless,” says Allen, who helped build ShakeAlert and advised Google on its seismic program.

Android phones have been publicly detecting earthquakes since last year, but until now, these results were only available in Google’s search results. Getting rid of false alarms wasn’t so difficult: Early on, some phones believed that AMBER alerts issued in the US, which cause the phone to vibrate to warn users of a missing or kidnapped child, were earthquakes; The vibration caused by the sound of thunderstorms also led to false reports.

When the phone detects an earthquake signal, it sends a word, with approximate location, to a central server. And while a traditional earthquake warning system only needs four seismic stations to detect an earthquake, more than 100 phones need to sound the alarm before Google can believe it. Once such an earthquake is detected, loud, full-screen alerts are sent to phones in areas where, based on physics-based seismic forecasts, you should receive vibration strong enough to feel it and break windows or dishes.

So far, Android phones have detected more than 1000 earthquakes worldwide. Allen says the alerts performed well in terms of speed and accuracy when compared to ShakeAlert and the Japanese warning system. The phones also detected a magnitude 7 earthquake that originated north of Samos, a Greek island near Turkey, in late October 2020. “We can really show it. [that]If we had the alerts in place, we would have provided alerts in Greece, ”Allen says.

Outside researchers say the Android system still has a lot to prove, including its ability to detect earthquakes that start in sparsely populated areas. Meyer says New Zealand will be a special challenge, because so much of its population congregates in just a few cities. This means that phones may not warn of an earthquake that starts far from the city center until after it has actually started shaking.

Many of the earthquakes in New Zealand also originate outside where there are few phones, notes Caroline Francois Holden, an independent seismologist who until recently worked at GNS Science, the nation’s leading geological institute. This makes the phone system less than ideal for warning of fatal tsunamis. “Any earthquake early warning system must be designed with this in mind,” she says. Although the cost savings Google’s system offers looks perfect, it needs careful examination, she says. “As a Kiwi scientist and former government employee, I would like to see quantitative measures of performance.”

She adds that until system performance becomes clear, Google must be wary of making promises too much. New Zealand’s wealth, size, and high seismicity make it a great playground for testing such new technologies. But the scars left by the Christchurch earthquake are still dry. “Everyone knows someone who has lost a loved one,” she says. “Any promise to reduce the loss of life must be dealt with with great sympathy.”

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