Smartphones
could become the makeshift quake detectors of the future, thanks to a new app
launched Friday designed to track tremors and potentially save the lives of its
users.
MyShake,
available on Android, links users to become an all-in-one earthquake warning
system; it records quake-type rumblings, ties a critical number of users to a
location, and could eventually provide a countdown to the start of shaking.
Its inventors
say the app, released by the University of California, Berkeley, could give
early warning of a quake to populations without their own seismological
instruments.
“MyShake cannot
replace traditional seismic networks like those run by the U.S. Geological
Survey,” said Richard Allen, leader of the app project and director of the
Berkeley Seismological Laboratory.
“But we think
MyShake can make earthquake early warning faster and more accurate in areas
that have a traditional seismic network, and can provide life-saving early
warning in countries that have no seismic network.”
Earthquake-prone
countries in the developing world with poor ground-based seismic network or
early warning systems include Nepal, Peru, Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Iran, he
said.
The algorithm
behind MyShake, developed by a handful of Silicon Valley programmers, relies on
the same technology smartphone gamers depend on to sense the phone’s
orientation, known as the accelerometer, in order to measure movement caused by
quakes.
What
smartphones lack in sensitivity – they can only record earthquakes above
magnitude 5 within 10 kilometers (6 miles) – they make up for in ubiquity.
Currently, 300
smartphones equipped with MyShake within a 110-km square area are enough to
estimate a quake’s location, magnitude and origin time.
There were some
3.4 billion smartphone subscriptions worldwide in 2015, according to the
Ericsson Mobility Report, so the app’s creators hope to build a seismic network
covering the globe.
“We want to
make this a killer app, where you put it on your phone and allow us to use your
accelerometer, and we will deliver earthquake early warning,” Allen said.
Sophisticated
early-warning systems can warn of coming quakes as much as a few minutes before
they begin, but cannot stop them causing death and destruction on a large
scale.
Nepal is still
rebuilding after two separate earthquakes in April and May 2015 that killed
9,000 people, injured more than 22,000 and damaged or destroyed nearly 900,000
houses.
(Reporting
by Sebastien Malo, editing by Tim Pearce. Via the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the
charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s
rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change.)
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