“Earthquake --- Run!”, “Help---”. Earthquake seemed tp be part of our lives that happened every day, especial for the countries located in Pacific Rim.
Since 1000 years ago, the scientists had been working on Earthquakes prediction, such as “Hou seismograph” in China. Till today, it is still not as easy to predict as volcanic eruptions.
There are still some ways of monitoring the chances of an earthquake:
- Laser beams
- A seismometer
- Radon gas escapes from the cracks in the Earth Crust.
- A large scale of animal activity in abnormal
But, none of them is able to give enough time for broadcasting the prediction.
“A few extra seconds can mean the difference between life and death!” Japan Earthquake Prediction Center said “We already had an early warning system that relied on more than 1000 seismometers throughout the country, which could offer a prediction 5-10seconds early than the Earthquake. But such systems are expensive and require time-consuming installation. How to broadcast in golden time is still an issue."
The new research said “The smart phone in your pocket could soon save you from an earthquake”. Researchers have shown that it is possible to use GPS data from smart phones to detect tremors, in order to potentially provide an early warning system to those who have not yet been hit. Previous studies of crowdsourcing earthquake early warning systems have relied on phones' accelerometers. Scientific GPS stations have already been used to detect earthquakes. New study found that even consumer devices with GPS could be useful for crowdsourcing warnings because more and more of our devices integrated GPS navigation, including vehicles. Increasing the amounts of data could boost the sensitivity of such efforts.
There are still few challenges to the approach. For example, the software has to deal with phones behaving unpredictably during an earthquake, such as falling from a table onto the floor. This is just a first step, but a great step. We believe that it will work and come true soon.