A few seconds warning seems like it might be kind of useless for humans, especially at 3am, but it would be cool to have this feed into automatic systems to automatically put them in a "safer" state before an earthquake hits. It might even be that 10 false positives a day are worth it to catch one real event, if the "safing" operation is relatively non-disruptive.
To be clear, the detectors in Napa felt the tremors then transmitted the data to Berkeley. They got a 10 second warning because the tremors travel much slower than the speed of light. Being 10 seconds away means the quake is much less intense. This is helpful, but what we need is a warning for people within a few seconds of the epicenter.
Japan, Mexico City, and other seismically active places, have such systems in place and have had them for years. Amazing that California, the epicenter of tech, is just getting on board with this.
Back in 1999/2000 I had a friend in Castro Valley call me in the morning to ask me if I was feeling the earthquake - I said nope, and then 5 seconds later - it hit me in Sunnyvale.<p>That's another way of earthquake advance warning - taking advantage of the latency between the epicenter and the surrounding area.
"QuakeFinder" is crowdsourcing earthquake warning system. It uses accelerometers in laptops, tablets, smartphones and special PC boards. The hypothesis is that tens of thousands of networked accelerometers with so-so signals may be useful for seismology, compared to few hundred professional seismometers drilled into bedrock. I saw some promising early studies, but lost track of the project.
I was in an earthquake in Hiroshima a few months ago. When the shaking started I was really confused. If my phone was blaring "earthquake" it would have been helpful.<p>Also, the warning on my iPhone was in Japanese and it was impossible to copy and paste it into a translator it so it was useless.
This could be very interesting if the 10 second timescale could be increased - as it stands 10 seconds is not enough time to do anything meaningful other than potentially crawl under your desk.<p>I know little of the science behind earthquakes and the movement of tectonic plates, however it would seem that if 10 seconds warning is possible today then further longer periods of time in the future could help people and or the technology surrounding building's and the infrastructure within the building to ready themselves/itself for the onset of an earthquake.
10 seconds might be enough time to trigger a custom alert on iPhones and Droids with a specific alarm that an earthquake is imminent. Enough time to get under a table.
I couldn't find how I could get this. I got a txt from the USGS but that was after the event and because I set up twitter to txt me that account, does anyone know how to get these early warnings?<p>I woke up, but in SF it wasn't much of a big deal.
This post is a nice reminder of the privacy issues (and how users should really consider what information they choose to give away).<p>Yes scientifically this is interesting. But it also means that we are willingly allowing ourselves to be tracked to great detail. You know they have internal reports or queries to show who has sex and when. Not that this is a big deal - we're human, and humans have sex. But it also can show who is having sex with whom, in some cases.<p>How long until Jawbone starts receiving court requests for this? (probably already happens).
"The system works because while earthquakes travel at the speed of sound ..."<p>That sounds like a somewhat misleading simplification or a complete misunderstanding.<p>Presumably "the speed of sound in the earth" and "the speed at which earthquakes travel" is by definition the same - earthquakes just being "sound vibrations" in the earth with macro level amplitudes. I'd be very surprised if that was particularly close to what people think of as "the speed of sound" (which I'd assume means "about 350m/s").