How Google alerted Californians to an earthquake before it happened

There was an earthquake that was about to hit in the Bay Area. Some of the messages said that you might have felt a bit uneasy. The alert was seen by more than one million people. It arrived just before the ground began to move.

It is not the first time that an earthquake alert has been sent to a device. The alert hit enough phones to get the attention of the larger public. In the past, earthquakes have come without warning, catching people off guard and leaving them without advance notice to take cover. This alert aims to take some of the unpredictability out of earthquakes.

“One of the things we’re trying to do is build an earthquake early warning industry,” says Robert de Groot, who is part of the ShakeAlert operations team, a project under the United States Geological Survey that detects the first signs of earthquakes. “We’re doing things that we haven’t really ever thought of.” Advertisement

The tech can't predict earthquakes, and the US Geological Survey doesn't think it will be able to predict earthquakes in the future. People usually feel them, but it does detect them early. Someday the alert can be sent out even quicker, giving people more time to get out of harms way.

Time to roll

ShakeAlert provides information to state government agencies and third parties when an earthquake begins on the west coast. It has been made easier to find that information in those precious seconds. The company sent push notifications to people in the area of an earthquake without them having to download a separate app.

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There are things that can't be done. The closer a person is to the earthquake, the less likely they are to get an alert. The sensors are placed on the west coast. According to de Groot, there will be a total of 1,755 by the year 2025. Tuesday's alert warned of a 4.8-magnitude earthquake, but the measurement was later adjusted to 5.1.

Google has also turned individual phones into miniature earthquake sensors. All smartphones have accelerometers that can pick up signals of an earthquake. If triggered, the phone sends the message to a detection server, along with rough location data, like the city a device is in. The server then pieces together where the earthquake is happening from data collected on multiple phones and beams out the relevant alerts.

When plugged in and locked, phones pick up the waves. It helps to not confuse phones in bags and pockets. Sending signals with even more speed is the long term goal. Stogaitis says that they are trying to make the time from which an earthquake begins and the time that we detect it and send an alert as fast as possible.

If you want to pick up signals in an earthquake, Equipping phones to pick up signals is a cheaper and quicker way to do it. It requires people and their phones to be close to the earthquakes, but that is not always the case. Even though all of these sensors are underground and in your pocket, they still provide crucial seconds to drop and cover, something people need to do as quickly as possible. People don't feel earthquakes until it's already happening You are now in the middle of something. It is something that is relatively new. We are trying to find the best way to get people to do that.

The story was first published on wired.com.