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Earthquakes making life difficult? There’s an app for that.

MyShake is an Android app developed by a team of seismologists and computer scientists at the University of California, Berkeley. Qingkai Kong and Richard Allen are the chief engineers and their app is being hailed as possibly a significant step for seismological research.

The app is helpful to individuals of course—if an earthquake is coming your way, it uses a phone’s accelerometer which comes standard to measure seismology. But it is a more important development that the app, when combined with other phones in the area, can chart a real time earthquake map and provide essential safety information for the predicting the direction an earthquake is headed.

Here is a brief of the developers’ methods and their belief in the app’s potential, published in the journal Science Advances.

“Large magnitude earthquakes in urban environments continue to kill and injure tens to hundreds of thousands of people, inflicting lasting societal and economic disasters. Earthquake early warning (EEW) provides seconds to minutes of warning, allowing people to move to safe zones and automated slowdown and shutdown of transit and other machinery. The handful of EEW systems operating around the world use traditional seismic and geodetic networks that exist only in a few nations. Smartphones are much more prevalent than traditional networks and contain accelerometers that can also be used to detect earthquakes.”

We report on the development of a new type of seismic system, MyShake, that harnesses personal/private smartphone sensors to collect data and analyze earthquakes. We show that smartphones can record magnitude 5 earthquakes at distances of 10 km or less and develop an on-phone detection capability to separate earthquakes from other everyday shakes,” the scientists write.

In contrast to other Beta earthquake apps which rely on the battery-draining GPS of mobile phones, the major achievement of these scientists is using the accelerometer of the phones.

“Our proof-of-concept system then collects earthquake data at a central site where a network detection algorithm confirms that an earthquake is under way and estimates the location and magnitude in real time. This information can then be used to issue an alert of forthcoming ground shaking.” “MyShake could be used to enhance EEW in regions with traditional networks and could provide the only EEW capability in regions without. In addition, the seismic waveforms recorded could be used to deliver rapid microseism maps, study impacts on buildings, and possibly image shallow earth structure and earthquake rupture kinematics.”

The app relies on confirmation from other nearby phones in order to avoid false alarms, immediately sending out a warning to everyone in the area that an earthquake is coming.

Giving people even a few seconds heads up that an earthquake is imminent saves lives. It is enough time to take cover, according to seismologists.

The app, if implemented more broadly, is a major step in fighting earthquake-related deaths. And the app is free, proving that people are more important than profits.

Hundreds of earthquakes occur in the state of California in any given year and scientists believe the state is due for a major earthquake very soon.