There have a been some large earthquakes in Japan recently to go with the hundreds of years of earthquake activity Japan has experienced.

In 1923 when the Great Kanto Earthquake hit Tokyo, the people didn’t have internet and communication devices that could easily carry messages around the globe. They didn’t even have accurate ways to measure the intensity of the earthquake and communicate that to local areas.

A lot of technological improvement has been made on the communication side of things and we can measure earths movements better now as well. The forecasting hasn’t yet made any large breakthroughs (excuse the pun).

In the last earthquake post I showed a web image from weathernews as below. They were using a networked service called the Yure Project (yureプロジェクト) to pull data over the internet from over 1,000 points in Japan and then show it back live through the web.

Through the project you can sign up for a paid service YEN 315 per month ($3) and get advance notice of an earthquake. You can either get the warning on your mobile phone, PC or have one of these devices attached that flashes as well.

If you are in an office or factory it could be pretty handy. If you are asleep in bed, maybe not so much.

Actually, the advance notice is only slightly advanced, and the service is called ‘The Last 10 second’. I think ’10 second Warning’ might have been a better name. ‘The Last 10 second’ sounds like the name of a movie where someone didn’t make it.

It is also possible to be a monitor in the yure project from your own house or at work. Here is a video showing the warning and feedback system. The countdown here is from around 14 seconds.







and the web software version without the flashing lights







If you are a monitor in the program you need to leave your computer on all the time and have to set up the software to relay data from the equipment back to the Center.

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