Smartphones To Warn You Of Earthquake

NEW YORK: Smartphones can function as early warning systems for large earthquakes, says a study.

The study found that the Global Positioning System receivers in a smartphone can detect the permanent ground movement caused by fault motion in a large earthquake.

Using crowd-sourced observations from participating users' smartphones, earthquakes could be detected, analysed, and customised earthquake warnings could be transmitted back to users, the researchers observed.

"Crowd-sourced alerting means that the community will benefit by data generated from the community," said lead author Sarah Minson from U.S. Geological Survey.

Earthquake early warning systems detect the start of an earthquake and rapidly transmit warnings to people and automated systems before they experience shaking at their location.

Researchers tested the feasibility of crowd-sourced EEW with a simulation of a hypothetical magnitude seven earthquake, and with real data from the 2011 magnitude nine Tohoku-oki, Japan earthquake.

The results showed that crowd-sourced EEW could be achieved with only a tiny percentage of people in a given area contributing information from their smartphones.
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