Crowdsourcing for securitySoftware turns laptops, PCs into earthquake early-warning system

Published 15 March 2010

Harnessing the power of accelerometers — tiny devices that detect movement, allowing, for example, iPhones to flip from vertical to horizontal and Wii devices to function as tennis rackets — and embedding them in laptops and PCs would create a local, regional, or even global network of “quake catchers” who would use their computers to map tremors

Elizabeth Cochran, an earth scientist at the University of California-Riverside, envisions a system in which volunteers would equip their computers with sensors so that every time the ground shakes, the machines would capture the Earth’s movement and feed the information to a central computer system, creating a rich — and inexpensive — portrait of how and where an earthquake is felt (see “Using Laptops to Detect Earthquakes,” 29 October 2008 HSNW).

Los Angeles Times’s Cara Mia DiMassa writes that such a network could dramatically boost scientists’ understanding of earthquakes — and bring researchers a step closer to an earthquake early-warning system that could give emergency officials vital seconds of preparation as a catastrophic temblor moved through the northern part of California.

Cochran believes that harnessing the power of accelerometers — tiny devices that detect movement, allowing iPhones to flip from vertical to horizontal and Wii devices to function as tennis rackets — would enable researchers to crate a richer and more nuanced picture of earthquakes. She and her colleagues at Riverside and at Stanford University have thus begun to build a system that links ordinary computers into a seismic network.

Ideally, Cochran said, “we would have seismometers in every building, or at least on every block. And in tall buildings, we’d have multiple sensors [on different floors]. That way, we would be able to actually get much higher detail, images of how the ground shakes during an earthquake.” If the idea catches on in schools, businesses and homes, it might even become part of an early-warning system that detects the outward ripple of an earthquake.

Until a few years ago, most of the research Cochran conducted about ground shaking required grueling field work: digging deep trenches into the earth to install sensors along a fault zone. Installing a simple program on a computer, she said with a laugh, “is quite a bit easier.” It is also a lot cheaper. Some newer laptops have accelerometers built in. For computers that do not, it is fairly easy to install a $50 sensor with a USB cable that measures movement in much the same way as an accelerometer.

DiMassa writes that Cochran got the idea for the network from a computer program on a friend’s MacBook. The program, called Seismac, allows people to shake their MacBook and get readings from the computer’s accelerometer. The program is designed for fun — but Cochran immediately wondered how it could be used to measure earthquakes.