Your newest app hums away in the background as your phone lies on the coffee table. The gentle thump of your speakers, the quiver of sound waves from a slammed door or a coffee mug set down too abruptly—these things do not perturb it. But as soon as the app feels the telltale rumble of a earthquake, it perks up.

Shooting out a tiny data packet, the app automatically warns scientists at a central database about the quake within milliseconds. Your phone has just become a single node in an entirely cellphone-based earthquake early warning system, and if enough smartphones users around you download the app, then you soon could be getting instant warnings that a quake is rolling your way.

The new Android app is called MyShake, and you can download it for free from the Google Play Store starting today. Engineered by a team of seismologists and computer scientists led by Qingkai Kong and Richard Allen at the University of California, Berkeley, MyShake is not only the coolest citizen-science tool you can download on your phone (a low bar, perhaps) but also heralds a massive step forward for seismological research. Using your smartphone's existing accelerometer, this is the first publicly available app to turn your phone into a mobile earthquake measuring station. In addition to releasing the app, the scientists also describe the underlying science and methods behind MyShake in a new paper published today in the journal Science Advances.

"Our rule of thumb when developing MyShake is that we never wanted it to use any more power than your phone uses when it's [hibernating,] and doing nothing," Allen says. "So, for any smartphone user that plugs in their phone to charge once per day, they won't even notice its there. You should download this app!"

Warning First, Data Later

Berkeley Seismological Laboratory

Unlike other proof-of-concept, phone-based earthquake warning systems (none of which are available on Android or iOS), MyShake eschews using your phone's GPS as a way to detect Earth's rumblings. One reason for this is that constantly running your phone GPS sucks up a lot of juice—something all too familiar to anyone who's used their phone to navigate on a long road trip without plugging it in. Instead, MyShake was developed to use your device's highly sensitive accelerometer to detect and report earthquakes.

According to Allen, making MyShake required surmounting two difficult problems. The first was to develop a smartphone algorithm that "specifically characterized earthquake shaking, versus everything else," he says. That saves battery power, because rather than the app sending out a constant stream of data and letting researchers back in the lab filter out what motion might be an earthquake, that filtering happens in the phone. This algorithm was developed after many, many experiments replicating earthquake-like shaking at a range of magnitudes as various phones laid on flat surfaces. (One major issue: MyShake won't work from your pocket. Sorry, it's too jittery.)

The second problem was "building an app that can monitor the accelerometer, and do that [filtering], without draining your battery," says Allen. Thankfully, his team had parters at Deutsche Telekom that helped with developing an efficient app.

Big Shake Data

Berkeley Seismological Laboratory

When MyShanke senses an earthquake, it does two things. The first happens immediately. The app sends out a rapid-fire packet of data to a central server. That data packet has the quake's origin time, location, and rough magnitude. Combined with other reports from phones nearby, the scientists have shown that they can automatically alert other phones within the earthquake's impending path—all within less than a second—notifying people as to the magnitude of the quake and how many seconds they have until it hits. The makers say that false alarms are very unlikely, because 60 percent of sitting-still MyShake-using smartphones need to report a quake for a potential alert to go out.

A few seconds is just enough time to jump under a desk, or slip into somewhere marginally safer—something seismologists know saves lives. This alert-feature is not on the app currently, but will be added shortly as an upgrade. First, the researchers need enough people to download and use the app to make sure they can work out any kinks.

Following the initial alert, Allen says, your phone waits until it's plugged into an outlet and connected to WiFi, then shoots off a larger data file. This is "a five minute recording from your accelerometer, one minute from before the earthquake hits and four minutes after," he says. As a citizen science tool, this is extraordinarily cool. This type of phone-based data set will offer never-before-seen resolution of earthquakes as they happen.

"Even the most dense seismic networks only have stations every 10 kilometers; here with MyShake you could potentially gather data every few tens of meters," says Allen. That new resolution could "allow us to image and recreate the rupture of an earthquake in a whole new way, allowing us to understand the strength that we end up seeing at the surface on a new dimension," says Allen. MyShake could also help transform how we engineer earthquake safe buildings. Imagine having many smartphones in the same skyscraper, for example: "We'll have 3D measurements of how a building is shaking in an earthquake, allowing engineers to understand and design better buildings in the future," says Allen.

The app has a few other cool tools too. If you're in an area with a documented history of famous earthquakes, (say, San Francisco) you can see what the effects of famous quakes were at your exact position. So, we're calling on you, dear readers. For the love of science, download MyShake!

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