Run, a quake's on its way!

Abstract

At the US Geological Survey, Benjamin Brooks is looking at smartphones, which come equipped with GPS sensors that can tell where one is standing, give or take a few meters. Their sensors can also detect a sudden lurch in one direction--the kind of movement that might be a sign of a seismic shift when lagged by many people at once. Brooks and his colleagues have now tested what crowdsourced GPS data might look like in a real earthquake. One simulation explored a model magnitude 7.0 earthquake along the Hayward fault on the east side of the San Francisco Bay, and another used location data recorded at scientific stations during Japan's devastating megaquake in 2011. Both scenarios suggested that data from around 5,000 people would be enough to spot the beginnings of a major earthquake, leaving about 5 seconds to warn major population centers that hadn't yet felt its effects