In all honesty I'd say Google and Apple are probably the best candidates to implement an earthquake monitoring system. At any given moment in time there are loads of cellphones that are sitting idly on a table or other fixed object. If the next version of Android and iOS were to gather and send back anonymous, location-tagged accelerometer data automatically (as part of the basic operating system), vibration correlations could be looked for on a massive scale, outlying data points removed, and an earthquake warning system implemented at essentially zero cost. The sensors are already out there.<p>Battery life impact could be reduced by creating an automatic timeshare where only a small fraction of those millions of people are collecting data at any given time; the data would probably still be sufficient. The percentage of users actively collecting data could also be dynamically increased to improve accuracy when a possible seismic event is detected anywhere in the system.
I like this idea of distributing the load, but what about a phone app that was able to use the sensors on your phone. I would think there would be some way of using the iPhone's internal sensors for this purpose, and pushed via an app store, I think it would reach more people. IDK...
What about hard drives in a datacenter?
Polling read latency for instance of a couple thousand drives could provide enough data.
Has this been attempted before?
As far as I know there is nothing more reliable than animals for detecting earthquakes. Typically animals go crazy when they realize a coming earthquake.<p><a href="http://gizmodo.com/5833733/how-your-dog-knows-an-earthquake-is-coming-way-before-you-do" rel="nofollow">http://gizmodo.com/5833733/how-your-dog-knows-an-earthquake-...</a><p>One way to take advantage of that could be to stick sensors (radio monitoring, RFID or something) to some animals. If the animals go crazy then the pattern of their movements is a reliable sign of a soon coming earthquake.