Since the smartphone is basically a miniaturized bundle of sensors, I suppose this was inevitable – but it’s still cool. NewScientist’s Timothy Revell reports on how smartphones can be used in earthquake monitoring:
An app called MyShake is revolutionising earthquake detection. The app turns anyone’s phone into a seismology tool, and the project’s first results show it is surprisingly effective.
“We found that MyShake could detect large earthquakes, but also small ones, which we never thought would be possible,” says Qingkai Kong from the University of California, Berkeley, who is a co-creator of the app. Since launching in February, it has detected more than 200 seismic events across the world using data captured by 200,000 people who have downloaded the Android app.
The comments in Google Play are all over the map, so I don’t really get any sense about its utility on the ground, and my phone is too old to run it.
As a software engineer, I wonder if they’ve structured this so that other data can be collected as well, much like the BOINC project, which is used for distributed network computing for many applications, the first of which was SETI@Home, which I’ve been running since before BOINC came out, roughly April of 1999.
[UPDATE] While looking through the MyShake site I noticed it listed a 7.7 earthquake off the Chilean coast, which I had not heard about.
But here’s an independent report from CNN:
A magnitude 7.7 earthquake occurred off the coast of southern Chile Sunday, 40 km (about 25 miles) southwest of Puerto Quellon, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued a tsunami threat message for parts of the Pacific Ocean close to the earthquake. Tsunami waves 1-3 meters above tide level are possible on parts of the Chilean coast, according to the center.
The Hydrographic and Oceanographic Service of the Chilean Navy issued a tsunami alert for the region of Los Lagos.
Meanwhile, Chile’s Ministry of the Interior and Public Security has asked people to leave the beach areas of the regions of Bio Bio, La Araucania, Los Rios and Aysen near the quake zone.
