Earthquake-predicting laptops could save lives

2 Apr 2008 | 12:36 BST

By Sylvie Barak

SCIENTISTS HAVE COME UP with an innovative way of bettering earthquake early warning systems, using the accelerometers found inside most contemporary laptops. Since there is still no system able to predict earthquakes before they actually happen, early warning systems are critical in saving lives and resources by providing anything between 5 and 20 second forewarnings.

A seismologist at the University of California at Riverside, Elizabeth Cochran, came up with the idea after seeing a Mac program called SeisMac which makes use of the accelerometers in the laptop allowing people to shake them and see the motion converted into graphs on screen. Accelerometers, are actually just tiny motion sensors used in portable devices for games and safety. For example, in the unfortunate case that you might drop your shiny new laptop on the floor, during the free fall, accelerometers would detect the motion and translate it into a digital signal which would then move the hard drive head to a safer position, minimising damage when it hits the ground.

Cochran, two other scientists and a computer programmer set to work in September 2007 to create the software, which they dubbed Quake Catcher Network. The programme uses the same platform as alien scanning network SETI, called BOINC, to collect data from the laptops connected to the project network.

Seeing as Accelerometers are built into so many of today’s notebooks, including including Apple's MacBook and Lenovo's ThinkPad, as well as the iPhone and Nintendo's Wii, it’s not hard to imagine how, with millions of laptops around the world, the motion sensing accelerometers could be transformed into early warning earthquake grids.

The US Geological Survey (USGS) currently have a fair few seismic stations set up around the globe, but they’re fixed and expensive to build and run. A geophysicist from Tel Aviv University, explained that if most of the world’s laptop users could be persuaded to sign themselves up for Quake Catcher, the number of "listening posts" for seismic activity would become a finely-spread grid providing much more data than the existing stations, and would be cheaper to boot.

Such a system would be extremely useful in relaying digital signals that could shut down major primary systems, including data centers and oil or gas distribution channels in a very short interval of time. This could end up reducing earthquake damage costs by billions of dollars. "Five seconds could mean everything in a powerful earthquake", he said. An early warning system could also give people up to 20 seconds to take cover

The difficulty with perfecting the software, however, is deciding whether vibrations are actually seismic or, say, workmen digging up the road outside. To ensure that they don’t get any false positives, Cochran and her team are working on algorithms that weigh the statistical probability of half a dozen computers shaking the same amount at the same time. Also, the boffins are working on ways to rank the data coming into the system by accuracy, meaning that not all "stations" would be given the same credibility. A laptop belonging to someone who moves it more, would not be ranked as highly as one that stays put on a desk, for instance.

Quake Catcher is still a while off from being released, and even further away from issuing real and useful warnings, but hopefully by the time the next really massive earthquake takes place, laptops could save lives. µ

L’Inq
Wired

See Also
USGS

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