Institute For The Future

Massively Multi-Sensor Earthquake Detection

After discovering a free application that let her Mac laptop display movement like a seismograph, seismologist Elizabeth Cochran of UC Riverside was struck by a pretty good idea: let's turn our laptops into real earthquake sensors.

 Cochran and Stanford seismologist Jesse Lawrence have made use of the sensors built into many new laptops that sense when the computer is being dropped, and turned them into earthquake monitors. They hope to sign up thousands of users to act like a grid of detectors that can sense an earthquake before it does too much damage.

Like many earthquake early warning systems around the world, when a quake strikes, this system will send a warning to people living in large cities. Because electronic communication systems (in this case, the internet) are much faster than seismic waves, the warning should arrive before the shaking, giving people 10 or 20 seconds to take shelter.

The "Quake Catcher Network" relies on the accelerometers built into recent model MacBooks (and a few other models). Although a single machine could see a quake, it would also see various bumps and shakes and keytaps. By aggregating signals from a multitude of laptops, however, it becomes easier to tell when a real earthquake is underway.

...the laptop monitors the data localy for new high-energy signals and only sends a single time and a single significance measurement for high energy signals. If our server receives a bunch of these times and significance measurements all at once, then it is likely that an earthquake is happening. If the server receives only a time and significance measurement from one laptop, then the server knows the laptop was shaken by something smaller and more local (like your sister running by, or the door slamming).

QCN uses the "BOINC" software made famous by SETI@Home, and used by dozens of collaborative computing projects studying everything from protein folding to the global climate.