Laptop earthquake monitoring

[sentosa]

A simple idea for monitoring earthquakes that Elizabeth Cochran, a seismologist at UC Riverside, came up with in 2006 is being realized today, and has the potential to save lives in case an earthquake strikes. The idea involves inviting the public to help monitor earthquakes by simply using their laptop computers at home. In doing so, the laptops join a network of computers designed to take a dense set of measurements that can help capture an earthquake.

Because the project makes use of inexpensive motion sensors, called accelerometers, which are already in place as safety devices in most new laptops, participants incur no significant costs related to the project.
"There is a delay of 10-15 seconds from when the sensors record an earthquake to when the data is processed at either Caltech in Southern California or UC Berkeley in Northern California," Cochran explained. "Quake-Catcher Network would process data in real time, as it comes in. And the network can stretch out to any region of the world. Besides being inexpensive, it makes an extremely small demand on CPU resources."

According to Cochran, a person's laptop needs to remain inactive for at least three minutes before the system starts up. "This is to get rid of noise in the data and to ensure that any movement the laptop's accelerometer is detecting is indeed out of the ordinary," she said.

Currently, only Apple computers can participate in the project, but Cochran and her colleagues are working on including other computers in Quake-Catcher Network.

"We also are working on developing an accelerometer which can be plugged into a desktop like a USB flash drive," she said. "That way, we'd have less interference from typing on the keyboard. It also would allow for a more robust and reliable system, with computers running the software all of the time."

Cochran said she plans to make all the data gathered by the sensors freely available to researchers and the public.

"This data can be used to study how a seismic wave propagates in the ground," she said. "How fast a wave travels can give us useful information, such as more details on seismic hazard as well as the structure of the Earth. The denser our network, the clearer will be the picture of what is happening at each step in time. A series of such pictures could be used to develop a movie showing the wave's propagation, which could give us extremely useful information about seismic waves."

Next, Cochran and her colleagues will further test their software program before its release on BOINC; currently, the program is available on very limited release.

[qviri]

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