Google is using motion sensors on more than 2 billion smartphones to create an earthquake early warning system that is as effective as a standard seismometer, a new study reveals.
Between 2021 and 2024, the company’s Android Earthquake Warning (AEA) system has won over 11,000 earthquakes via smartphone accelerometers and issued over 1,200 alerts to Android users in 98 countries.
The system has increased the number of people who can access earthquake alerts by 10 times, from 250 million in 2019 to 2.5 billion today. Researchers published their findings in the journal Science on July 17th.
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“Earthquakes are a constant threat to communities around the world. We are good at knowing where they could be hit, but when they do, we are still facing devastating consequences,” a Google representative wrote in a statement. “What if you could give people a few seconds of warning before the shaking begins? Those seconds can be enough time to get off the ladder and cover them away from dangerous objects.”
In recent decades, earthquake warning systems have been deployed in countries such as China, Mexico, Japan, South Korea and the United States. However, these systems are built using earthquake stations as nodes and are expensive. This means that most earthquake-prone countries only have local compensation, and many other countries have nothing.
Related: Earthquake prediction is currently not possible. GPS data helps to change it
To bridge this coverage gap, Google researchers designed an AEA system to use smartphones and smartwatch accelerators to detect rapidly moving P-waves that are typically ahead of more destructive S-waves during earthquakes. Using this sensor network, AEA can estimate the size of the earthquake and where it will hit, and send warnings to users in the danger zone.
Opening up a new frontier
Researchers faced many challenges. Because phone accelerators are far less accurate than seismometers, the team has stitched together the pure ubiquity of Android devices and data from the default logging of motion data.
Transforming these pooled signals into meaningful warnings required explanations of the differences in device and regional variations of geology and building layout.
Currently active in several countries, including Greece, Türkiye, the US, Japan and Indonesia. As of March 2024, the AEA had issued 1,279 alerts.
User feedback reveals that 85% of people who have experienced an earthquake get alerts, with 36% getting one, 28% and 23% getting before the shaking begins.
Only three of the alerts were false, two were caused by thunderstorms and the other was triggered by an unrelated mass notification event that vibrated many phones.
However, there are still problems in estimating the magnitude of large earthquakes, especially those that hit Turkey in February 2023. These tremors were significantly underestimated by the AEA.
Events like this raise questions about lifesaving software owned and operated by the tech giant, but Google argues that its technology “helps supplementing the official warning system” rather than simply replacing them.
“The AEA demonstrates that it can use globally distributed smartphones to detect earthquakes and issue large-scale warnings with effectiveness comparable to established national systems,” the researchers write. “The big earthquake remains the most important and challenging for all eews [earthquake early-warning] The system, and global implementation of AEA, supports efforts to improve detection using rapid, large-scale data collection and algorithm feedback. ”
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