From temblor : “Can smartphones affixed to buildings detect earthquakes?”

From temblor

September 1, 2021
By Meghomita Das, Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences, McGill University (CA).

Damaging earthquakes can strike at any time, leaving behind a trail of devastation. Recovery from such events can take several years. Unfortunately, scientists cannot forecast the exact time an earthquake will strike. But extensive research in the field of earthquake early warning systems is ongoing. Such systems can provide seconds of warning, which could save lives and prevent people from overwhelming emergency management systems.

The 2009 Cinchona earthquake, that struck close to the capital city of San Jose, caused 34 fatalities and collapsed houses across Costa Rica. Credit: Capt Diana Parzik, US Army, via Wikipedia, CC-Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Earthquake early warning systems work by having a densely distributed network of seismic stations capable of rapidly detecting an earthquake, and by sending alerts that warn of shaking to the population. A significant hurdle to designing and implementing such systems is the high cost of installing multiple, scientific-grade seismic stations across earthquake-prone regions. For countries like India or Mexico, which have limited resources and high population densities, these expensive networks are not feasible.

In a recent study published in AGU Advances, a team of scientists explored whether a low-cost, robust and operational earthquake early warning system — built around comparatively cheap smartphones instead of seismic stations — might become a reality in the near future in Costa Rica, a country that regularly experiences high-magnitude earthquakes. During a six-month testing period, this network, called Alerta Sismica Temprana Utilizando Telefonos Inteligentes (ASTUTI), a collaborative effort between The Geological Survey (US) and the National University of Costa Rica [Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica] (CR), detected and sent alerts for five earthquakes that produced significant shaking in San Jose, Costa Rica’s densely populated capital city.

Smartphones and earthquakes

Smartphones come packaged with GPS location services-constant communication via cell networks-and a device called an accelerometer that helps your phone’s screen rotate as you move it around. The accelerometer can also record any shaking your phone may experience. “Essentially, your phone costs maybe $100 and has all the three components that are there in a scientific grade seismic station, which costs thousands of dollars,” says Marino Protti, a study co-author and a seismologist at the Observatorio Vulcanologico y Sismologico de Costa Rica (Universidad Nacional).

To set up the ASTUTI network, the team deployed 82 Android smartphones, encased in protective boxes, throughout Costa Rica, at an annual cost of $20,000 USD. They installed these smartphones inside buildings, on either the walls or floors of the ground story. The phones are plugged in to AC power supplies.

The accelerometers stream data via cellular networks in real time to the cloud, says Protti. A cloud-based server receives signals from all stations. So, when an earthquake strikes and four sites detect strong ground motion, an alert goes out to people in San Jose, providing between 10 and 30 seconds of warning before the earthquake’s waves arrive, he explains.

San Jose’s location relative to the Middle America Trench — where the Cocos Plate dives beneath the Caribbean Plate — is perfect to test the efficacy of this network because the city is in the Goldilocks position. It’s far enough from the trench such that issuing a timely alert is feasible, but close enough such that the population will feel shaking. The ASTUTI network also issued alerts as soon as events were detected, rather than either waiting for an earthquake to grow larger or trying to define its characteristics. This choice gave people more time to protect themselves.

Did ASTUTI feel it?

During its six months of operation, a group of people selected to receive alerts via phone were notified of five events that ASTUTI detected, with magnitudes ranging between 4.8 and 5.3. Thirteen earthquakes struck Costa Rica in that time, but the other eight earthquakes did not produce significant shaking to warrant an alert. For two of the five detected events, ASTUTI sent out alerts at the earliest possible time — when the first wave from the earthquake, also called the P-wave — was detected by smartphones. This provided people with enough time to take protective action. Moreover, each of the five detected events were accompanied by a “Did You Feel It” report by the U.S. Geological Survey. This citizen science project collects “felt reports” from people who felt shaking (or didn’t) during earthquakes worldwide. In other words, the earthquakes that shook people enough to file a report were detected by the ASTUTI network.

One of the ASTUTI earthquake early warning stations. Image on the left shows the encased smartphone, and image on the right shows the software interface that records data from the station. Credit: Brooks et al., 2021, CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0.

With recent advancements in earthquake early warning, there is a potential for developing a network consisting of expensive high-end devices complemented by a larger number of low-cost devices capable of detecting ground motion, says Raj Prasanna, a telecommunications and electronics engineer and senior lecturer at Massey University-New Zealand [Te Kunenga Ki Pūrehuroa](NZ) who was not involved with this study. “Together, they can become an affordable warning network, with acceptable levels of reliability,” he says.

In the next phase of development, the team plans to create a hybrid system by integrating this smartphone-enabled network with Costa Rica’s existing scientific-grade seismic network, which will improve the accuracy and reduce time of detection of the earthquake early warning system.

What the public wants

Setting up an earthquake early warning system that effectively prompts the public to get to safety is challenging, says Sarah Minson of the USGS, a co-author of the new study. “How do we find out what people want; how do we find out if they are enjoying the system?” she asks. Because earthquake early warning systems are relatively new and people haven’t interacted with them, Minson says, they may not have a personal feel for what works for them. Plus, every country’s needs are different. People’s responses to the same alerts vary depending upon how that specific society culturally reacts to natural hazards.

To that end, the team plans to develop a smartphone-based application. In the future, they will work with the National Commission for Risk Prevention and Emergency Management in Costa Rica to measure how the Costa Rican population perceives earthquake early warning. The goal, says Protti, is to create a more coordinated response plan for earthquakes in Costa Rica. By coupling effective messaging with earthquake early warning, the public will have crucial seconds to take actions that can protect their lives.

References

Brooks, B. A., Protti, M., Ericksen, T., Bunn, J., Vega, F., Cochran, E. S., … & Glennie, C. L. (2021). Robust earthquake early warning at a fraction of the cost: ASTUTI Costa Rica. AGU Advances, 2(3), e2021AV000407.

See the full article here .

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Stem Education Coalition

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Network project Earthquake Network is a research project which aims at developing and maintaining a crowdsourced smartphone-based earthquake warning system at a global level. Smartphones made available by the population are used to detect the earthquake waves using the on-board accelerometers. When an earthquake is detected, an earthquake warning is issued in order to alert the population not yet reached by the damaging waves of the earthquake.

The project started on January 1, 2013 with the release of the homonymous Android application Earthquake Network. The author of the research project and developer of the smartphone application is Francesco Finazzi of the University of Bergamo, Italy.

Get the app in the Google Play store.

Smartphone network spatial distribution (green and red dots) on December 4, 2015

Meet The Quake-Catcher Network

Quake-Catcher Network

The Quake-Catcher Network is a collaborative initiative for developing the world’s largest, low-cost strong-motion seismic network by utilizing sensors in and attached to internet-connected computers. With your help, the Quake-Catcher Network can provide better understanding of earthquakes, give early warning to schools, emergency response systems, and others. The Quake-Catcher Network also provides educational software designed to help teach about earthquakes and earthquake hazards.

After almost eight years at Stanford, and a year at CalTech, the QCN project is moving to the University of Southern California Dept. of Earth Sciences. QCN will be sponsored by the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) and the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC).

The Quake-Catcher Network is a distributed computing network that links volunteer hosted computers into a real-time motion sensing network. QCN is one of many scientific computing projects that runs on the world-renowned distributed computing platform Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).

The volunteer computers monitor vibrational sensors called MEMS accelerometers, and digitally transmit “triggers” to QCN’s servers whenever strong new motions are observed. QCN’s servers sift through these signals, and determine which ones represent earthquakes, and which ones represent cultural noise (like doors slamming, or trucks driving by).

There are two categories of sensors used by QCN: 1) internal mobile device sensors, and 2) external USB sensors.

Mobile Devices: MEMS sensors are often included in laptops, games, cell phones, and other electronic devices for hardware protection, navigation, and game control. When these devices are still and connected to QCN, QCN software monitors the internal accelerometer for strong new shaking. Unfortunately, these devices are rarely secured to the floor, so they may bounce around when a large earthquake occurs. While this is less than ideal for characterizing the regional ground shaking, many such sensors can still provide useful information about earthquake locations and magnitudes.

USB Sensors: MEMS sensors can be mounted to the floor and connected to a desktop computer via a USB cable. These sensors have several advantages over mobile device sensors. 1) By mounting them to the floor, they measure more reliable shaking than mobile devices. 2) These sensors typically have lower noise and better resolution of 3D motion. 3) Desktops are often left on and do not move. 4) The USB sensor is physically removed from the game, phone, or laptop, so human interaction with the device doesn’t reduce the sensors’ performance. 5) USB sensors can be aligned to North, so we know what direction the horizontal “X” and “Y” axes correspond to.

If you are a science teacher at a K-12 school, please apply for a free USB sensor and accompanying QCN software. QCN has been able to purchase sensors to donate to schools in need. If you are interested in donating to the program or requesting a sensor, click here.

BOINC is a leader in the field(s) of Distributed Computing, Grid Computing and Citizen Cyberscience.BOINC is more properly the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, developed at UC Berkeley.

Earthquake safety is a responsibility shared by billions worldwide. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) provides software so that individuals can join together to improve earthquake monitoring, earthquake awareness, and the science of earthquakes. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) links existing networked laptops and desktops in hopes to form the worlds largest strong-motion seismic network.

Below, the QCN Quake Catcher Network map

ShakeAlert: An Earthquake Early Warning System for the West Coast of the United States

The U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) along with a coalition of State and university partners is developing and testing an earthquake early warning (EEW) system called ShakeAlert for the west coast of the United States. Long term funding must be secured before the system can begin sending general public notifications, however, some limited pilot projects are active and more are being developed. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018.

Watch a video describing how ShakeAlert works in English or Spanish.

The primary project partners include:

United States Geological Survey
California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (CalOES)
California Geological Survey
California Institute of Technology
University of California Berkeley
University of Washington
University of Oregon
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

The Earthquake Threat

Earthquakes pose a national challenge because more than 143 million Americans live in areas of significant seismic risk across 39 states. Most of our Nation’s earthquake risk is concentrated on the West Coast of the United States. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has estimated the average annualized loss from earthquakes, nationwide, to be $5.3 billion, with 77 percent of that figure ($4.1 billion) coming from California, Washington, and Oregon, and 66 percent ($3.5 billion) from California alone. In the next 30 years, California has a 99.7 percent chance of a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake and the Pacific Northwest has a 10 percent chance of a magnitude 8 to 9 megathrust earthquake on the Cascadia subduction zone.

Part of the Solution

Today, the technology exists to detect earthquakes, so quickly, that an alert can reach some areas before strong shaking arrives. The purpose of the ShakeAlert system is to identify and characterize an earthquake a few seconds after it begins, calculate the likely intensity of ground shaking that will result, and deliver warnings to people and infrastructure in harm’s way. This can be done by detecting the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, which rarely causes damage. Using P-wave information, we first estimate the location and the magnitude of the earthquake. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated and a warning is provided to local populations. The method can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, bringing the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage.

Studies of earthquake early warning methods in California have shown that the warning time would range from a few seconds to a few tens of seconds. ShakeAlert can give enough time to slow trains and taxiing planes, to prevent cars from entering bridges and tunnels, to move away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments and to take cover under a desk, or to automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems. Taking such actions before shaking starts can reduce damage and casualties during an earthquake. It can also prevent cascading failures in the aftermath of an event. For example, isolating utilities before shaking starts can reduce the number of fire initiations.

System Goal

The USGS will issue public warnings of potentially damaging earthquakes and provide warning parameter data to government agencies and private users on a region-by-region basis, as soon as the ShakeAlert system, its products, and its parametric data meet minimum quality and reliability standards in those geographic regions. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018. Product availability will expand geographically via ANSS regional seismic networks, such that ShakeAlert products and warnings become available for all regions with dense seismic instrumentation.

Current Status

The West Coast ShakeAlert system is being developed by expanding and upgrading the infrastructure of regional seismic networks that are part of the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS); the California Integrated Seismic Network (CISN) is made up of the Southern California Seismic Network, SCSN) and the Northern California Seismic System, NCSS and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN). This enables the USGS and ANSS to leverage their substantial investment in sensor networks, data telemetry systems, data processing centers, and software for earthquake monitoring activities residing in these network centers. The ShakeAlert system has been sending live alerts to “beta” users in California since January of 2012 and in the Pacific Northwest since February of 2015.

In February of 2016 the USGS, along with its partners, rolled-out the next-generation ShakeAlert early warning test system in California joined by Oregon and Washington in April 2017. This West Coast-wide “production prototype” has been designed for redundant, reliable operations. The system includes geographically distributed servers, and allows for automatic fail-over if connection is lost.

This next-generation system will not yet support public warnings but does allow selected early adopters to develop and deploy pilot implementations that take protective actions triggered by the ShakeAlert notifications in areas with sufficient sensor coverage.

Authorities

The USGS will develop and operate the ShakeAlert system, and issue public notifications under collaborative authorities with FEMA, as part of the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program, as enacted by the Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act of 1977, 42 U.S.C. §§ 7704 SEC. 2.

For More Information

Robert de Groot, ShakeAlert National Coordinator for Communication, Education, and Outreach
rdegroot@usgs.gov
626-583-7225

Learn more about EEW Research

ShakeAlert Fact Sheet

ShakeAlert Implementation Plan

QuakeAlertUSA

About Early Warning Labs, LLC

Early Warning Labs, LLC (EWL) is an Earthquake Early Warning technology developer and integrator located in Santa Monica, CA. EWL is partnered with industry leading GIS provider ESRI, Inc. and is collaborating with the US Government and university partners.

EWL is investing millions of dollars over the next 36 months to complete the final integration and delivery of Earthquake Early Warning to individual consumers, government entities, and commercial users.

EWL’s mission is to improve, expand, and lower the costs of the existing earthquake early warning systems.

EWL is developing a robust cloud server environment to handle low-cost mass distribution of these warnings. In addition, Early Warning Labs is researching and developing automated response standards and systems that allow public and private users to take pre-defined automated actions to protect lives and assets.

EWL has an existing beta R&D test system installed at one of the largest studios in Southern California. The goal of this system is to stress test EWL’s hardware, software, and alert signals while improving latency and reliability.

Earthquake Early Warning Introduction

The United States Geological Survey (USGS), in collaboration with state agencies, university partners, and private industry, is developing an earthquake early warning system (EEW) for the West Coast of the United States called ShakeAlert. The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program aims to mitigate earthquake losses in the United States. Citizens, first responders, and engineers rely on the USGS for accurate and timely information about where earthquakes occur, the ground shaking intensity in different locations, and the likelihood is of future significant ground shaking.

The ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning System recently entered its first phase of operations. The USGS working in partnership with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) is now allowing for the testing of public alerting via apps, Wireless Emergency Alerts, and by other means throughout California.

ShakeAlert partners in Oregon and Washington are working with the USGS to test public alerting in those states sometime in 2020.

ShakeAlert has demonstrated the feasibility of earthquake early warning, from event detection to producing USGS issued ShakeAlerts ® and will continue to undergo testing and will improve over time. In particular, robust and reliable alert delivery pathways for automated actions are currently being developed and implemented by private industry partners for use in California, Oregon, and Washington.

Earthquake Early Warning Background

The objective of an earthquake early warning system is to rapidly detect the initiation of an earthquake, estimate the level of ground shaking intensity to be expected, and issue a warning before significant ground shaking starts. A network of seismic sensors detects the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, and the location and the magnitude of the earthquake is rapidly determined. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated. The system can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, which brings the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage. Warnings will be distributed to local and state public emergency response officials, critical infrastructure, private businesses, and the public. EEW systems have been successfully implemented in Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, and other nations with varying degrees of sophistication and coverage.

Earthquake early warning can provide enough time to:

Instruct students and employees to take a protective action such as Drop, Cover, and Hold On
Initiate mass notification procedures
Open fire-house doors and notify local first responders
Slow and stop trains and taxiing planes
Install measures to prevent/limit additional cars from going on bridges, entering tunnels, and being on freeway overpasses before the shaking starts
Move people away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments
Shut down gas lines, water treatment plants, or nuclear reactors
Automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems

However, earthquake warning notifications must be transmitted without requiring human review and response action must be automated, as the total warning times are short depending on geographic distance and varying soil densities from the epicenter.

From Science Alert (AU) : “Weird Electromagnetic Bursts Appear Before Earthquakes – And We May Finally Know Why”

From Science Alert (AU)

30 MAY 2021
DAVID NIELD

Credit: jamievanbuskirk/E+/Getty Images.

For some time, seismologists have been aware of brief subtle anomalies in underground electrical fields leading up to an earthquake, sometimes occurring as soon as a few weeks before the quake happens.

It’s tempting to think these electromagnetic bursts could be used to predict when a quake will strike. Up until now, however, the cause of the strange bursts hasn’t been clear.

New research suggests that the key lies in the gases that get trapped in what’s known as a fault valve and can build up ahead of an earthquake. These impermeable layers of rock can slip across a fault, effectively creating a gate that blocks the flow of underground water.

When the fault valve eventually cracks and pressure decreases, carbon dioxide or methane dissolved in the trapped water is released, expanding in volume and pushing the cracks in the fault. As the gas emerges, it also gets electrified, with electrons released from the cracked surfaces attaching themselves to gas molecules and generating a current as they move upwards.

“The results supported the validity of the present working hypothesis, that coupled interaction of fracturing rock with deep Earth gases during quasi-static rupture of rocks in the focal zone of a fault might play an important role in the generation of pre- and co-seismic electromagnetic phenomena,” write the researchers in their published paper .

From the cited science paper.

Using a customized lab setup, the team was able to test the reactions of quartz diorite, gabbro, basalt, and fine-grained granite in scaled-down earthquake-like simulations. They showed that electrified gas currents could indeed be linked to rock fracture.

The type of rock does make a difference, the scientists found. Rocks including granite have lattice defects that capture unpaired electrons over time through natural radiation rising from below the surface, and that leads to a larger current.

And the type of fault seems to have an effect as well. The study backs up previous research [Scientific Reports] from the same scientists into seismo-electromagnetics, showing how carbon dioxide released from an earthquake fault could be electrified and produce magnetic fields.

Other hypotheses [Science] about the electromagnetic bursts include the idea that the rocks themselves could become semiconductors under enough strain and with enough heat, while other experts don’t think these weird bursts are predictors at all.

Until an earthquake is actually predicted by unusual electromagnetic activity – activity that happens a lot on our planet as a matter of course anyway – the jury is still out. But if this idea is backed up by future research, it could give us a life-saving method for getting a heads up on future quakes.

“As a result of this laboratory experiment, it might be possible to detect the electric signal accompanying an earthquake by observing the telluric potential/current induced in a conductor, such as a steel water pipe buried underground,” conclude the researchers.

“Such an approach is now undergoing model field tests.”

The research has been published in Earth, Planets and Space.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Network project is a research project which aims at developing and maintaining a crowdsourced smartphone-based earthquake warning system at a global level. Smartphones made available by the population are used to detect the earthquake waves using the on-board accelerometers. When an earthquake is detected, an earthquake warning is issued in order to alert the population not yet reached by the damaging waves of the earthquake.

The project started on January 1, 2013 with the release of the homonymous Android application Earthquake Network. The author of the research project and developer of the smartphone application is Francesco Finazzi of the University of Bergamo, Italy.

Get the app in the Google Play store.

Smartphone network spatial distribution (green and red dots) on December 4, 2015

Meet The Quake-Catcher Network

Quake-Catcher Network

The Quake-Catcher Network is a collaborative initiative for developing the world’s largest, low-cost strong-motion seismic network by utilizing sensors in and attached to internet-connected computers. With your help, the Quake-Catcher Network can provide better understanding of earthquakes, give early warning to schools, emergency response systems, and others. The Quake-Catcher Network also provides educational software designed to help teach about earthquakes and earthquake hazards.

After almost eight years at Stanford University (US), and a year at California Institute of Technology (US), the QCN project is moving to the University of Southern California (US) Dept. of Earth Sciences. QCN will be sponsored by the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) and the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC).

The Quake-Catcher Network is a distributed computing network that links volunteer hosted computers into a real-time motion sensing network. QCN is one of many scientific computing projects that runs on the world-renowned distributed computing platform Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).

The volunteer computers monitor vibrational sensors called MEMS accelerometers, and digitally transmit “triggers” to QCN’s servers whenever strong new motions are observed. QCN’s servers sift through these signals, and determine which ones represent earthquakes, and which ones represent cultural noise (like doors slamming, or trucks driving by).

There are two categories of sensors used by QCN: 1) internal mobile device sensors, and 2) external USB sensors.

Mobile Devices: MEMS sensors are often included in laptops, games, cell phones, and other electronic devices for hardware protection, navigation, and game control. When these devices are still and connected to QCN, QCN software monitors the internal accelerometer for strong new shaking. Unfortunately, these devices are rarely secured to the floor, so they may bounce around when a large earthquake occurs. While this is less than ideal for characterizing the regional ground shaking, many such sensors can still provide useful information about earthquake locations and magnitudes.

USB Sensors: MEMS sensors can be mounted to the floor and connected to a desktop computer via a USB cable. These sensors have several advantages over mobile device sensors. 1) By mounting them to the floor, they measure more reliable shaking than mobile devices. 2) These sensors typically have lower noise and better resolution of 3D motion. 3) Desktops are often left on and do not move. 4) The USB sensor is physically removed from the game, phone, or laptop, so human interaction with the device doesn’t reduce the sensors’ performance. 5) USB sensors can be aligned to North, so we know what direction the horizontal “X” and “Y” axes correspond to.

If you are a science teacher at a K-12 school, please apply for a free USB sensor and accompanying QCN software. QCN has been able to purchase sensors to donate to schools in need. If you are interested in donating to the program or requesting a sensor, click here.

BOINC is a leader in the field(s) of Distributed Computing, Grid Computing and Citizen Cyberscience.BOINC is more properly the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, developed at UC Berkeley.

Earthquake safety is a responsibility shared by billions worldwide. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) provides software so that individuals can join together to improve earthquake monitoring, earthquake awareness, and the science of earthquakes. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) links existing networked laptops and desktops in hopes to form the worlds largest strong-motion seismic network.

Below, the QCN Quake Catcher Network map

QuakeAlertUSA

About Early Warning Labs, LLC

Early Warning Labs, LLC (EWL) is an Earthquake Early Warning technology developer and integrator located in Santa Monica, CA. EWL is partnered with industry leading GIS provider ESRI, Inc. and is collaborating with the US Government and university partners.

EWL is investing millions of dollars over the next 36 months to complete the final integration and delivery of Earthquake Early Warning to individual consumers, government entities, and commercial users.

EWL’s mission is to improve, expand, and lower the costs of the existing earthquake early warning systems.

EWL is developing a robust cloud server environment to handle low-cost mass distribution of these warnings. In addition, Early Warning Labs is researching and developing automated response standards and systems that allow public and private users to take pre-defined automated actions to protect lives and assets.

EWL has an existing beta R&D test system installed at one of the largest studios in Southern California. The goal of this system is to stress test EWL’s hardware, software, and alert signals while improving latency and reliability.

ShakeAlert: An Earthquake Early Warning System for the West Coast of the United States

The U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) along with a coalition of State and university partners is developing and testing an earthquake early warning (EEW) system called ShakeAlert for the west coast of the United States. Long term funding must be secured before the system can begin sending general public notifications, however, some limited pilot projects are active and more are being developed. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018.

Watch a video describing how ShakeAlert works in English or Spanish.

The primary project partners include:

United States Geological Survey
California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (CalOES)
California Geological Survey
California Institute of Technology
University of California Berkeley
University of Washington
University of Oregon
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

The Earthquake Threat

Earthquakes pose a national challenge because more than 143 million Americans live in areas of significant seismic risk across 39 states. Most of our Nation’s earthquake risk is concentrated on the West Coast of the United States. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has estimated the average annualized loss from earthquakes, nationwide, to be $5.3 billion, with 77 percent of that figure ($4.1 billion) coming from California, Washington, and Oregon, and 66 percent ($3.5 billion) from California alone. In the next 30 years, California has a 99.7 percent chance of a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake and the Pacific Northwest has a 10 percent chance of a magnitude 8 to 9 megathrust earthquake on the Cascadia subduction zone.

Part of the Solution

Today, the technology exists to detect earthquakes, so quickly, that an alert can reach some areas before strong shaking arrives. The purpose of the ShakeAlert system is to identify and characterize an earthquake a few seconds after it begins, calculate the likely intensity of ground shaking that will result, and deliver warnings to people and infrastructure in harm’s way. This can be done by detecting the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, which rarely causes damage. Using P-wave information, we first estimate the location and the magnitude of the earthquake. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated and a warning is provided to local populations. The method can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, bringing the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage.

Studies of earthquake early warning methods in California have shown that the warning time would range from a few seconds to a few tens of seconds. ShakeAlert can give enough time to slow trains and taxiing planes, to prevent cars from entering bridges and tunnels, to move away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments and to take cover under a desk, or to automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems. Taking such actions before shaking starts can reduce damage and casualties during an earthquake. It can also prevent cascading failures in the aftermath of an event. For example, isolating utilities before shaking starts can reduce the number of fire initiations.

System Goal

The USGS will issue public warnings of potentially damaging earthquakes and provide warning parameter data to government agencies and private users on a region-by-region basis, as soon as the ShakeAlert system, its products, and its parametric data meet minimum quality and reliability standards in those geographic regions. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018. Product availability will expand geographically via ANSS regional seismic networks, such that ShakeAlert products and warnings become available for all regions with dense seismic instrumentation.

Current Status

The West Coast ShakeAlert system is being developed by expanding and upgrading the infrastructure of regional seismic networks that are part of the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS); the California Integrated Seismic Network (CISN) is made up of the Southern California Seismic Network, SCSN) and the Northern California Seismic System, NCSS and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN). This enables the USGS and ANSS to leverage their substantial investment in sensor networks, data telemetry systems, data processing centers, and software for earthquake monitoring activities residing in these network centers. The ShakeAlert system has been sending live alerts to “beta” users in California since January of 2012 and in the Pacific Northwest since February of 2015.

In February of 2016 the USGS, along with its partners, rolled-out the next-generation ShakeAlert early warning test system in California joined by Oregon and Washington in April 2017. This West Coast-wide “production prototype” has been designed for redundant, reliable operations. The system includes geographically distributed servers, and allows for automatic fail-over if connection is lost.

This next-generation system will not yet support public warnings but does allow selected early adopters to develop and deploy pilot implementations that take protective actions triggered by the ShakeAlert notifications in areas with sufficient sensor coverage.

Authorities

The USGS will develop and operate the ShakeAlert system, and issue public notifications under collaborative authorities with FEMA, as part of the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program, as enacted by the Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act of 1977, 42 U.S.C. §§ 7704 SEC. 2.

For More Information

Robert de Groot, ShakeAlert National Coordinator for Communication, Education, and Outreach
rdegroot@usgs.gov
626-583-7225

Learn more about EEW Research

ShakeAlert Fact Sheet

ShakeAlert Implementation Plan

Earthquake Early Warning Introduction

The United States Geological Survey (USGS), in collaboration with state agencies, university partners, and private industry, is developing an earthquake early warning system (EEW) for the West Coast of the United States called ShakeAlert. The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program aims to mitigate earthquake losses in the United States. Citizens, first responders, and engineers rely on the USGS for accurate and timely information about where earthquakes occur, the ground shaking intensity in different locations, and the likelihood is of future significant ground shaking.

The ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning System recently entered its first phase of operations. The USGS working in partnership with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) is now allowing for the testing of public alerting via apps, Wireless Emergency Alerts, and by other means throughout California.

ShakeAlert partners in Oregon and Washington are working with the USGS to test public alerting in those states sometime in 2020.

ShakeAlert has demonstrated the feasibility of earthquake early warning, from event detection to producing USGS issued ShakeAlerts ® and will continue to undergo testing and will improve over time. In particular, robust and reliable alert delivery pathways for automated actions are currently being developed and implemented by private industry partners for use in California, Oregon, and Washington.

Earthquake Early Warning Background

The objective of an earthquake early warning system is to rapidly detect the initiation of an earthquake, estimate the level of ground shaking intensity to be expected, and issue a warning before significant ground shaking starts. A network of seismic sensors detects the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, and the location and the magnitude of the earthquake is rapidly determined. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated. The system can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, which brings the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage. Warnings will be distributed to local and state public emergency response officials, critical infrastructure, private businesses, and the public. EEW systems have been successfully implemented in Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, and other nations with varying degrees of sophistication and coverage.

Earthquake early warning can provide enough time to:

Instruct students and employees to take a protective action such as Drop, Cover, and Hold On
Initiate mass notification procedures
Open fire-house doors and notify local first responders
Slow and stop trains and taxiing planes
Install measures to prevent/limit additional cars from going on bridges, entering tunnels, and being on freeway overpasses before the shaking starts
Move people away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments
Shut down gas lines, water treatment plants, or nuclear reactors
Automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems

However, earthquake warning notifications must be transmitted without requiring human review and response action must be automated, as the total warning times are short depending on geographic distance and varying soil densities from the epicenter.

GNSS-Global Navigational Satellite System

GNSS station | Pacific Northwest Geodetic Array, Central Washington University (US)

_____________________________________________________________________________________

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

From Tohoku University [東北大学](JP): “Flare Ups and Crustal removal in North East Japan”

From Tohoku University [東北大学](JP)
2021-04-16 [Just now in social media.]

Rocks in the Northeast of Japan. Credit: Daniel Pastor-Galán and Tatsuki Tsujimori.

The crustal record is the geologist’s book for studying the history of the Earth. It contains information to understand important aspects such as when the earliest crustal rocks separated from the mantle; the origin and evolution of life; the inception and development of plate tectonics, oceans, atmosphere and the magnetic field.

Unfortunately, this information is disrupted and fragmented due to growth and recession. Subduction erosion found in Northeast Japan has permanently destroyed crucial pieces of information to understand our planet.

The Japanese Islands are at the juncture between the Pacific and Asian plates which is the locus of continental growth through volcanic activity and is also the site of recycling of the Earth’s crust as the Pacific plate dives beneath the Asian continental crust. This process, known as subduction, not only recycles the Pacific oceanic crust, but also causes tectonic erosion as the Pacific plate grinds away the base of the continental crust. The tectonic erosion of the continental crust has been related to the occurrence of megathrust earthquakes.

Rocks in the Northeast of Japan.Ⓒ Daniel Pastor-Galán and Tatsuki Tsujimori.

An international research team led by Daniel Pastor-Galán, assistant professor at the Frontier Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences (FRIS) at Tohoku University, and Tatsuki Tsujimori, professor at the Center for Northeast Asian Studies (CNEAS), has defined the events that punctuated the crustal history of Northeast Japan. The study has revealed the main ages of the events that shaped the geological roots of Japan.

Science paper:
Earth and Planetary Science Letters

The results show a fierce history of periodic magmatic flare-ups; subduction erosion when the Pacific slab destroyed the Japanese continental crust; the complete removal and substitution of the original Japanese crust roughly 270 million years ago; and the total melting of such crust around 110 million years ago.

Understanding the history of subduction, the processes associated with it and the mechanisms operating at the base of the crust are crucial to understanding the history of the continental crust and the trends in potential geohazards. Pastor-Galán says “the study represents a landmark towards understanding the origin and evolution of the geological roots of Japan, and the mechanisms operating at subduction zones in deep time.”
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Network project is a research project which aims at developing and maintaining a crowdsourced smartphone-based earthquake warning system at a global level. Smartphones made available by the population are used to detect the earthquake waves using the on-board accelerometers. When an earthquake is detected, an earthquake warning is issued in order to alert the population not yet reached by the damaging waves of the earthquake.

The project started on January 1, 2013 with the release of the homonymous Android application Earthquake Network. The author of the research project and developer of the smartphone application is Francesco Finazzi of the University of Bergamo, Italy.

Get the app in the Google Play store.

Smartphone network spatial distribution (green and red dots) on December 4, 2015

Meet The Quake-Catcher Network

Quake-Catcher Network

The Quake-Catcher Network is a collaborative initiative for developing the world’s largest, low-cost strong-motion seismic network by utilizing sensors in and attached to internet-connected computers. With your help, the Quake-Catcher Network can provide better understanding of earthquakes, give early warning to schools, emergency response systems, and others. The Quake-Catcher Network also provides educational software designed to help teach about earthquakes and earthquake hazards.

After almost eight years at Stanford, and a year at CalTech, the QCN project is moving to the University of Southern California Dept. of Earth Sciences. QCN will be sponsored by the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) and the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC).

The Quake-Catcher Network is a distributed computing network that links volunteer hosted computers into a real-time motion sensing network. QCN is one of many scientific computing projects that runs on the world-renowned distributed computing platform Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).

The volunteer computers monitor vibrational sensors called MEMS accelerometers, and digitally transmit “triggers” to QCN’s servers whenever strong new motions are observed. QCN’s servers sift through these signals, and determine which ones represent earthquakes, and which ones represent cultural noise (like doors slamming, or trucks driving by).

There are two categories of sensors used by QCN: 1) internal mobile device sensors, and 2) external USB sensors.

Mobile Devices: MEMS sensors are often included in laptops, games, cell phones, and other electronic devices for hardware protection, navigation, and game control. When these devices are still and connected to QCN, QCN software monitors the internal accelerometer for strong new shaking. Unfortunately, these devices are rarely secured to the floor, so they may bounce around when a large earthquake occurs. While this is less than ideal for characterizing the regional ground shaking, many such sensors can still provide useful information about earthquake locations and magnitudes.

USB Sensors: MEMS sensors can be mounted to the floor and connected to a desktop computer via a USB cable. These sensors have several advantages over mobile device sensors. 1) By mounting them to the floor, they measure more reliable shaking than mobile devices. 2) These sensors typically have lower noise and better resolution of 3D motion. 3) Desktops are often left on and do not move. 4) The USB sensor is physically removed from the game, phone, or laptop, so human interaction with the device doesn’t reduce the sensors’ performance. 5) USB sensors can be aligned to North, so we know what direction the horizontal “X” and “Y” axes correspond to.

If you are a science teacher at a K-12 school, please apply for a free USB sensor and accompanying QCN software. QCN has been able to purchase sensors to donate to schools in need. If you are interested in donating to the program or requesting a sensor, click here.

BOINC is a leader in the field(s) of Distributed Computing, Grid Computing and Citizen Cyberscience.BOINC is more properly the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, developed at UC Berkeley.

Earthquake safety is a responsibility shared by billions worldwide. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) provides software so that individuals can join together to improve earthquake monitoring, earthquake awareness, and the science of earthquakes. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) links existing networked laptops and desktops in hopes to form the worlds largest strong-motion seismic network.

Below, the QCN Quake Catcher Network map

ShakeAlert: An Earthquake Early Warning System for the West Coast of the United States

The U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) along with a coalition of State and university partners is developing and testing an earthquake early warning (EEW) system called ShakeAlert for the west coast of the United States. Long term funding must be secured before the system can begin sending general public notifications, however, some limited pilot projects are active and more are being developed. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018.

Watch a video describing how ShakeAlert works in English or Spanish.

The primary project partners include:

United States Geological Survey
California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (CalOES)
California Geological Survey
California Institute of Technology
University of California Berkeley
University of Washington
University of Oregon
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

The Earthquake Threat

Earthquakes pose a national challenge because more than 143 million Americans live in areas of significant seismic risk across 39 states. Most of our Nation’s earthquake risk is concentrated on the West Coast of the United States. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has estimated the average annualized loss from earthquakes, nationwide, to be $5.3 billion, with 77 percent of that figure ($4.1 billion) coming from California, Washington, and Oregon, and 66 percent ($3.5 billion) from California alone. In the next 30 years, California has a 99.7 percent chance of a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake and the Pacific Northwest has a 10 percent chance of a magnitude 8 to 9 megathrust earthquake on the Cascadia subduction zone.

Part of the Solution

Today, the technology exists to detect earthquakes, so quickly, that an alert can reach some areas before strong shaking arrives. The purpose of the ShakeAlert system is to identify and characterize an earthquake a few seconds after it begins, calculate the likely intensity of ground shaking that will result, and deliver warnings to people and infrastructure in harm’s way. This can be done by detecting the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, which rarely causes damage. Using P-wave information, we first estimate the location and the magnitude of the earthquake. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated and a warning is provided to local populations. The method can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, bringing the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage.

Studies of earthquake early warning methods in California have shown that the warning time would range from a few seconds to a few tens of seconds. ShakeAlert can give enough time to slow trains and taxiing planes, to prevent cars from entering bridges and tunnels, to move away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments and to take cover under a desk, or to automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems. Taking such actions before shaking starts can reduce damage and casualties during an earthquake. It can also prevent cascading failures in the aftermath of an event. For example, isolating utilities before shaking starts can reduce the number of fire initiations.

System Goal

The USGS will issue public warnings of potentially damaging earthquakes and provide warning parameter data to government agencies and private users on a region-by-region basis, as soon as the ShakeAlert system, its products, and its parametric data meet minimum quality and reliability standards in those geographic regions. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018. Product availability will expand geographically via ANSS regional seismic networks, such that ShakeAlert products and warnings become available for all regions with dense seismic instrumentation.

Current Status

The West Coast ShakeAlert system is being developed by expanding and upgrading the infrastructure of regional seismic networks that are part of the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS); the California Integrated Seismic Network (CISN) is made up of the Southern California Seismic Network, SCSN) and the Northern California Seismic System, NCSS and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN). This enables the USGS and ANSS to leverage their substantial investment in sensor networks, data telemetry systems, data processing centers, and software for earthquake monitoring activities residing in these network centers. The ShakeAlert system has been sending live alerts to “beta” users in California since January of 2012 and in the Pacific Northwest since February of 2015.

In February of 2016 the USGS, along with its partners, rolled-out the next-generation ShakeAlert early warning test system in California joined by Oregon and Washington in April 2017. This West Coast-wide “production prototype” has been designed for redundant, reliable operations. The system includes geographically distributed servers, and allows for automatic fail-over if connection is lost.

This next-generation system will not yet support public warnings but does allow selected early adopters to develop and deploy pilot implementations that take protective actions triggered by the ShakeAlert notifications in areas with sufficient sensor coverage.

Authorities

The USGS will develop and operate the ShakeAlert system, and issue public notifications under collaborative authorities with FEMA, as part of the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program, as enacted by the Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act of 1977, 42 U.S.C. §§ 7704 SEC. 2.

For More Information

Robert de Groot, ShakeAlert National Coordinator for Communication, Education, and Outreach
rdegroot@usgs.gov
626-583-7225

Learn more about EEW Research

ShakeAlert Fact Sheet

ShakeAlert Implementation Plan

QuakeAlertUSA

About Early Warning Labs, LLC

Early Warning Labs, LLC (EWL) is an Earthquake Early Warning technology developer and integrator located in Santa Monica, CA. EWL is partnered with industry leading GIS provider ESRI, Inc. and is collaborating with the US Government and university partners.

EWL is investing millions of dollars over the next 36 months to complete the final integration and delivery of Earthquake Early Warning to individual consumers, government entities, and commercial users.

EWL’s mission is to improve, expand, and lower the costs of the existing earthquake early warning systems.

EWL is developing a robust cloud server environment to handle low-cost mass distribution of these warnings. In addition, Early Warning Labs is researching and developing automated response standards and systems that allow public and private users to take pre-defined automated actions to protect lives and assets.

EWL has an existing beta R&D test system installed at one of the largest studios in Southern California. The goal of this system is to stress test EWL’s hardware, software, and alert signals while improving latency and reliability.

Earthquake Early Warning Introduction

The United States Geological Survey (USGS), in collaboration with state agencies, university partners, and private industry, is developing an earthquake early warning system (EEW) for the West Coast of the United States called ShakeAlert. The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program aims to mitigate earthquake losses in the United States. Citizens, first responders, and engineers rely on the USGS for accurate and timely information about where earthquakes occur, the ground shaking intensity in different locations, and the likelihood is of future significant ground shaking.

The ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning System recently entered its first phase of operations. The USGS working in partnership with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) is now allowing for the testing of public alerting via apps, Wireless Emergency Alerts, and by other means throughout California.

ShakeAlert partners in Oregon and Washington are working with the USGS to test public alerting in those states sometime in 2020.

ShakeAlert has demonstrated the feasibility of earthquake early warning, from event detection to producing USGS issued ShakeAlerts ® and will continue to undergo testing and will improve over time. In particular, robust and reliable alert delivery pathways for automated actions are currently being developed and implemented by private industry partners for use in California, Oregon, and Washington.

Earthquake Early Warning Background

The objective of an earthquake early warning system is to rapidly detect the initiation of an earthquake, estimate the level of ground shaking intensity to be expected, and issue a warning before significant ground shaking starts. A network of seismic sensors detects the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, and the location and the magnitude of the earthquake is rapidly determined. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated. The system can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, which brings the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage. Warnings will be distributed to local and state public emergency response officials, critical infrastructure, private businesses, and the public. EEW systems have been successfully implemented in Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, and other nations with varying degrees of sophistication and coverage.

Earthquake early warning can provide enough time to:

Instruct students and employees to take a protective action such as Drop, Cover, and Hold On
Initiate mass notification procedures
Open fire-house doors and notify local first responders
Slow and stop trains and taxiing planes
Install measures to prevent/limit additional cars from going on bridges, entering tunnels, and being on freeway overpasses before the shaking starts
Move people away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments
Shut down gas lines, water treatment plants, or nuclear reactors
Automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems

However, earthquake warning notifications must be transmitted without requiring human review and response action must be automated, as the total warning times are short depending on geographic distance and varying soil densities from the epicenter.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

See the full article here.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Tohoku University (東北大学] , located in Sendai, Miyagi in the Tōhoku Region, Japan, is a Japanese national university. It was the third Imperial University in Japan, the top three Designated National University along with the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University and selected as a Top Type university of Top Global University Project by the Japanese government. In 2020, the Times Higher Education ranked Tohoku University the top university in Japan.

In 2016, Tohoku University had 10 faculties, 16 graduate schools and 6 research institutes, with a total enrollment of 17,885 students. The university’s three core values are “Research First (研究第一主義),” “Open-Doors (門戸開放),” and “Practice-Oriented Research and Education (実学尊重).”

From temblor : “Surprising recharacterization of earthquake risk along a strand of the San Andreas”

From temblor

April 20, 2021
Ben Wolman (@bythewolman)

The San Andreas Fault (US) is as close to a celebrity as geological features can get — it even has a movie named in its honor.

San Andreas Fault

Since its formal identification in the late 19th century, the fault has been analyzed, dated, mapped and modeled by thousands of scientists. But its southernmost section, which is divided into strands like the frayed ends of a rope, still puzzles scientists.

The northern and central sections of the San Andreas have ruptured relatively recently, geologically speaking (in 1906 and 1857, respectively), producing magnitude-7+ earthquakes (Fialko, 2006). The southernmost section, southeast of Los Angeles, however, last ruptured in 1726 and has accumulated significant strain since. This is partly why people often say it’s “overdue” for a big quake (though faults can’t really be overdue).

A recent study published in Science Advances suggests that the Mission Creek strand of the San Andreas, which runs along the northeastern side of the Coachella Valley, is the dominant fault at this latitude, accounting for about 90% of the overall slip rate of the southern San Andreas Fault system. That means the Mission Creek strand — not the strands previously identified as accumulating the most strain — could host the next major earthquake on the southern San Andreas.

The southern San Andreas Fault consists of multiple strands. The Mission Creek strand may be a bigger risk for Southern California than previously thought. Credit: modified from Kimberly Blisniuk.

Slipping and straining

Slip rates describe the speed at which the two sides of a fault move relative to each other. Slip rates are typically ascertained through geologic measurements of landforms offset by fault movement, such as jags in alluvial fans, beheaded stream channels (those cut off from their headwaters), and vegetation lineaments (where dense vegetation meets less-dense vegetation in an abrupt line, likely due to a fault cutting off groundwater where the line occurs). Geodetic data obtained by ground motion observed in GPS or radar imaging can also be used to model slip rates.

Previous geologic and geodetic data suggested that one piece of the San Andreas in the Coachella Valley called the Banning strand was likely responsible for the bulk of the slipping northwest through the San Gorgonio Pass. The Banning and Mission Creek strands run roughly parallel to one another. The new study investigates the slip rates from two new locations in the valley.

Offset landforms

Kimberly Blisniuk, an earthquake geologist and geochronologist at San Jose State University (US), and her team started by reconstructing and dating landform offsets in the Indio Hills (Banning) and Pushawalla Canyon (Mission Creek). They used lidar imaging and field mapping to determine the offset of ancient stream channels and other landforms. Then the team combined two different dating techniques — uranium-thorium dating of soil and beryllium-10 dating of surface exposures — to provide a minimum age estimate and a maximum age estimate for the landforms.

The team noted that in Pushawalla Canyon, channels come out of a steep mountain front and hit the valley and aggrade in a unique stairstep-like terrace pattern, says Richard Heermance, a geologist at California State University-Northridge (US), who was not involved in the new research. By matching the deposits with their likely places of origin, and with “a distance and an age for each surface when they were just forming,” the team computed slip rates by simply dividing distance by age, Heermance says. The uniqueness of the Pushawalla Canyon landforms enabled this mapping, he adds. “That part of the story is great.”

Beheaded channels cut by a strand of the San Andreas fault. Credit: Kimberly Blisniuk.

The landform changes and dating together indicate that the Mission Creek strand at this latitude, previously thought to be inactive, has hosted the most earthquakes in this region over the last 100,000 years, Blisniuk and her team reported.

Slip on a different fault strand

In addition, Blisniuk and her team found that the Mission Creek strand at Pushawalla Canyon appears to slip approximately 0.9 inches (21.6 millimeters) per year — compared to the Banning strand’s 0.1 inches (2.5 millimeters) per year. That means in the last 295 years, the Mission Creek strand has accumulated 20-30 feet (6-9 meters) of elastic strain, a measure of stress. Think of elastic strain like a rubber band pulled taut: If you stop pulling on the rubber band, strain is released and it can go back to its normal shape. But if it’s pulled too tight for too long, it will snap and release that strain in the form of energy. Rocks along a fault do the same, releasing the strain in an earthquake. Thus, the Mission Creek strand may instead hold the lion’s share of earthquake potential at Pushawalla Canyon.

Risks to Los Angeles

The findings could be important for the densely populated Los Angeles area. “Before, we only had this one path where a southern San Andreas Fault earthquake could rupture through the greater Los Angeles area,” Blisniuk says. “Now we’re seeing that actually, kind of like the [2019] Ridgecrest earthquakes, which occurred on faults that weren’t identified, there are faults that we’ve identified as likely inactive, that may still be active.”

Future southern strand risk mapping

“This study has highlighted the need for more detailed studies,” Heermance says, especially through San Gorgonio Pass northwest of the Banning and Mission Creek strands where much of the strain in this region is currently thought to be accumulating. But Heermance says the approximately 0.9 inches (21.6 millimeters) of annual slip found in the study cannot yet be definitively attributed to the entire Mission Creek strand northwest of Pushawalla Canyon: It’s still an open question, he says, noting that future fault mapping should help reduce the uncertainty.

Blisniuk doing field work along the southern San Andreas Fault. Credit: Thomas Rockwell, San Jose State University (US).

Blisniuk agrees further landform offset analyses and dating of additional sites along the strands are needed. She says she’s excited by the promise of new data to be unearthed at these strands. “This is one of the best-studied faults in the world. And now with new technology and new dating techniques, we can test all of these [earthquake] models.” And those new data are suggesting that there’s so much to learn, and there’s so much to still investigate. “The past is the key to the present.”

References

Blisniuk, K., Scharer, K., Sharp, W.D., Burgmann, R., Amos, C., Rymer, M., 2021. A revised position for the primary strand of the Pleistocene-Holocene San Andreas fault in southern California. Sci Adv 7, eaaz5691. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaz5691

Fialko, Y., 2006. Interseismic strain accumulation and the earthquake potential on the southern San Andreas fault system. Nature 441, 968–971. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04797

Further Reading

Guns, K.A., Bennett, R.A., Spinler, J.C., McGill, S.F., 2020. New geodetic constraints on southern San Andreas fault-slip rates, San Gorgonio Pass, California. Geosphere 17, 39–68. https://doi.org/10.1130/GES02239.1

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Network projectEarthquake Network is a research project which aims at developing and maintaining a crowdsourced smartphone-based earthquake warning system at a global level. Smartphones made available by the population are used to detect the earthquake waves using the on-board accelerometers. When an earthquake is detected, an earthquake warning is issued in order to alert the population not yet reached by the damaging waves of the earthquake.

The project started on January 1, 2013 with the release of the homonymous Android application Earthquake Network. The author of the research project and developer of the smartphone application is Francesco Finazzi of the University of Bergamo, Italy.

Get the app in the Google Play store.

Smartphone network spatial distribution (green and red dots) on December 4, 2015

Meet The Quake-Catcher Network

Quake-Catcher Network

The Quake-Catcher Network is a collaborative initiative for developing the world’s largest, low-cost strong-motion seismic network by utilizing sensors in and attached to internet-connected computers. With your help, the Quake-Catcher Network can provide better understanding of earthquakes, give early warning to schools, emergency response systems, and others. The Quake-Catcher Network also provides educational software designed to help teach about earthquakes and earthquake hazards.

After almost eight years at Stanford, and a year at CalTech, the QCN project is moving to the University of Southern California Dept. of Earth Sciences. QCN will be sponsored by the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) and the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC).

The Quake-Catcher Network is a distributed computing network that links volunteer hosted computers into a real-time motion sensing network. QCN is one of many scientific computing projects that runs on the world-renowned distributed computing platform Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).

The volunteer computers monitor vibrational sensors called MEMS accelerometers, and digitally transmit “triggers” to QCN’s servers whenever strong new motions are observed. QCN’s servers sift through these signals, and determine which ones represent earthquakes, and which ones represent cultural noise (like doors slamming, or trucks driving by).

There are two categories of sensors used by QCN: 1) internal mobile device sensors, and 2) external USB sensors.

Mobile Devices: MEMS sensors are often included in laptops, games, cell phones, and other electronic devices for hardware protection, navigation, and game control. When these devices are still and connected to QCN, QCN software monitors the internal accelerometer for strong new shaking. Unfortunately, these devices are rarely secured to the floor, so they may bounce around when a large earthquake occurs. While this is less than ideal for characterizing the regional ground shaking, many such sensors can still provide useful information about earthquake locations and magnitudes.

USB Sensors: MEMS sensors can be mounted to the floor and connected to a desktop computer via a USB cable. These sensors have several advantages over mobile device sensors. 1) By mounting them to the floor, they measure more reliable shaking than mobile devices. 2) These sensors typically have lower noise and better resolution of 3D motion. 3) Desktops are often left on and do not move. 4) The USB sensor is physically removed from the game, phone, or laptop, so human interaction with the device doesn’t reduce the sensors’ performance. 5) USB sensors can be aligned to North, so we know what direction the horizontal “X” and “Y” axes correspond to.

If you are a science teacher at a K-12 school, please apply for a free USB sensor and accompanying QCN software. QCN has been able to purchase sensors to donate to schools in need. If you are interested in donating to the program or requesting a sensor, click here.

BOINC is a leader in the field(s) of Distributed Computing, Grid Computing and Citizen Cyberscience.BOINC is more properly the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, developed at UC Berkeley.

Earthquake safety is a responsibility shared by billions worldwide. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) provides software so that individuals can join together to improve earthquake monitoring, earthquake awareness, and the science of earthquakes. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) links existing networked laptops and desktops in hopes to form the worlds largest strong-motion seismic network.

Below, the QCN Quake Catcher Network map

ShakeAlert: An Earthquake Early Warning System for the West Coast of the United States

The U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) along with a coalition of State and university partners is developing and testing an earthquake early warning (EEW) system called ShakeAlert for the west coast of the United States. Long term funding must be secured before the system can begin sending general public notifications, however, some limited pilot projects are active and more are being developed. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018.

Watch a video describing how ShakeAlert works in English or Spanish.

The primary project partners include:

United States Geological Survey
California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (CalOES)
California Geological Survey
California Institute of Technology
University of California Berkeley
University of Washington
University of Oregon
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

The Earthquake Threat

Earthquakes pose a national challenge because more than 143 million Americans live in areas of significant seismic risk across 39 states. Most of our Nation’s earthquake risk is concentrated on the West Coast of the United States. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has estimated the average annualized loss from earthquakes, nationwide, to be $5.3 billion, with 77 percent of that figure ($4.1 billion) coming from California, Washington, and Oregon, and 66 percent ($3.5 billion) from California alone. In the next 30 years, California has a 99.7 percent chance of a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake and the Pacific Northwest has a 10 percent chance of a magnitude 8 to 9 megathrust earthquake on the Cascadia subduction zone.

Part of the Solution

Today, the technology exists to detect earthquakes, so quickly, that an alert can reach some areas before strong shaking arrives. The purpose of the ShakeAlert system is to identify and characterize an earthquake a few seconds after it begins, calculate the likely intensity of ground shaking that will result, and deliver warnings to people and infrastructure in harm’s way. This can be done by detecting the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, which rarely causes damage. Using P-wave information, we first estimate the location and the magnitude of the earthquake. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated and a warning is provided to local populations. The method can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, bringing the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage.

Studies of earthquake early warning methods in California have shown that the warning time would range from a few seconds to a few tens of seconds. ShakeAlert can give enough time to slow trains and taxiing planes, to prevent cars from entering bridges and tunnels, to move away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments and to take cover under a desk, or to automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems. Taking such actions before shaking starts can reduce damage and casualties during an earthquake. It can also prevent cascading failures in the aftermath of an event. For example, isolating utilities before shaking starts can reduce the number of fire initiations.

System Goal

The USGS will issue public warnings of potentially damaging earthquakes and provide warning parameter data to government agencies and private users on a region-by-region basis, as soon as the ShakeAlert system, its products, and its parametric data meet minimum quality and reliability standards in those geographic regions. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018. Product availability will expand geographically via ANSS regional seismic networks, such that ShakeAlert products and warnings become available for all regions with dense seismic instrumentation.

Current Status

The West Coast ShakeAlert system is being developed by expanding and upgrading the infrastructure of regional seismic networks that are part of the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS); the California Integrated Seismic Network (CISN) is made up of the Southern California Seismic Network, SCSN) and the Northern California Seismic System, NCSS and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN). This enables the USGS and ANSS to leverage their substantial investment in sensor networks, data telemetry systems, data processing centers, and software for earthquake monitoring activities residing in these network centers. The ShakeAlert system has been sending live alerts to “beta” users in California since January of 2012 and in the Pacific Northwest since February of 2015.

In February of 2016 the USGS, along with its partners, rolled-out the next-generation ShakeAlert early warning test system in California joined by Oregon and Washington in April 2017. This West Coast-wide “production prototype” has been designed for redundant, reliable operations. The system includes geographically distributed servers, and allows for automatic fail-over if connection is lost.

This next-generation system will not yet support public warnings but does allow selected early adopters to develop and deploy pilot implementations that take protective actions triggered by the ShakeAlert notifications in areas with sufficient sensor coverage.

Authorities

The USGS will develop and operate the ShakeAlert system, and issue public notifications under collaborative authorities with FEMA, as part of the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program, as enacted by the Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act of 1977, 42 U.S.C. §§ 7704 SEC. 2.

For More Information

Robert de Groot, ShakeAlert National Coordinator for Communication, Education, and Outreach
rdegroot@usgs.gov
626-583-7225

Learn more about EEW Research

ShakeAlert Fact Sheet

ShakeAlert Implementation Plan

QuakeAlertUSA

About Early Warning Labs, LLC

Early Warning Labs, LLC (EWL) is an Earthquake Early Warning technology developer and integrator located in Santa Monica, CA. EWL is partnered with industry leading GIS provider ESRI, Inc. and is collaborating with the US Government and university partners.

EWL is investing millions of dollars over the next 36 months to complete the final integration and delivery of Earthquake Early Warning to individual consumers, government entities, and commercial users.

EWL’s mission is to improve, expand, and lower the costs of the existing earthquake early warning systems.

EWL is developing a robust cloud server environment to handle low-cost mass distribution of these warnings. In addition, Early Warning Labs is researching and developing automated response standards and systems that allow public and private users to take pre-defined automated actions to protect lives and assets.

EWL has an existing beta R&D test system installed at one of the largest studios in Southern California. The goal of this system is to stress test EWL’s hardware, software, and alert signals while improving latency and reliability.

Earthquake Early Warning Introduction

The United States Geological Survey (USGS), in collaboration with state agencies, university partners, and private industry, is developing an earthquake early warning system (EEW) for the West Coast of the United States called ShakeAlert. The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program aims to mitigate earthquake losses in the United States. Citizens, first responders, and engineers rely on the USGS for accurate and timely information about where earthquakes occur, the ground shaking intensity in different locations, and the likelihood is of future significant ground shaking.

The ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning System recently entered its first phase of operations. The USGS working in partnership with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) is now allowing for the testing of public alerting via apps, Wireless Emergency Alerts, and by other means throughout California.

ShakeAlert partners in Oregon and Washington are working with the USGS to test public alerting in those states sometime in 2020.

ShakeAlert has demonstrated the feasibility of earthquake early warning, from event detection to producing USGS issued ShakeAlerts ® and will continue to undergo testing and will improve over time. In particular, robust and reliable alert delivery pathways for automated actions are currently being developed and implemented by private industry partners for use in California, Oregon, and Washington.

Earthquake Early Warning Background

The objective of an earthquake early warning system is to rapidly detect the initiation of an earthquake, estimate the level of ground shaking intensity to be expected, and issue a warning before significant ground shaking starts. A network of seismic sensors detects the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, and the location and the magnitude of the earthquake is rapidly determined. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated. The system can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, which brings the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage. Warnings will be distributed to local and state public emergency response officials, critical infrastructure, private businesses, and the public. EEW systems have been successfully implemented in Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, and other nations with varying degrees of sophistication and coverage.

Earthquake early warning can provide enough time to:

Instruct students and employees to take a protective action such as Drop, Cover, and Hold On
Initiate mass notification procedures
Open fire-house doors and notify local first responders
Slow and stop trains and taxiing planes
Install measures to prevent/limit additional cars from going on bridges, entering tunnels, and being on freeway overpasses before the shaking starts
Move people away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments
Shut down gas lines, water treatment plants, or nuclear reactors
Automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems

However, earthquake warning notifications must be transmitted without requiring human review and response action must be automated, as the total warning times are short depending on geographic distance and varying soil densities from the epicenter.

From temblor : “Overdue? The future of large earthquakes in California”

From temblor

April 21, 2021
Krystal Vasquez (@CaffeinatedKrys)

With hundreds of known faults running through the state, California is no stranger to earthquakes. In fact, one occurs about every three minutes, though the majority of these are too small to be felt. But even with all this seismic activity, the state’s three major fault lines have remained eerily quiet. Evidence shows that the San Andreas Fault (US), San Jacinto and Hayward faults should produce a major earthquake roughly three or four times per century (Biasi and Scherer, 2019). Yet, the last one struck in 1918.

This might not seem like a bad thing. After all, no one wants to experience a big earthquake. But seismologists know that with each passing year, these faults will continue to accumulate stress. Eventually, this stress will be released through a major earthquake — or maybe even several of them. It’s not a matter of if, but rather when this will happen. And given the state’s unusual shortage of large earthquakes, one could easily surmise that California’s well overdue.

However, David Jackson, a geophysicist at the University of California-Los Angeles (US), is not quite convinced. “It may be just luck” that there has not been a major earthquake, he admits. Alternatively, there might be some unknown interaction between the fault lines that has gifted the state with a relatively peaceful century. But at the 2021 Seismological Society of America (US) Annual Meeting today, Jackson advocated for another possibility: perhaps this so-called “anomalous hiatus” doesn’t actually exist.

Digging into Earth’s past

The oft-spoken phrase, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it,” applies to earthquakes, too. Studying California’s past earthquakes can help scientists get a better idea of how much shaking the state might see in the future.

They do this by digging trenches along active fault lines and searching for evidence of ground displacements or marks left behind on the shaken landscape. The gaps between these displacements tell a “micro-geologic story,” says Glenn Biasi, a geophysicist from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), who was not involved with the study. In other words, these trenches are used to reconstruct a timeline of past seismic events, which scientists can then use to calculate the likelihood that a major earthquake could occur within a subsequent time frame.

Digging a paleoseismic trench along the Hayward Fault. Credit: USGS.

That’s why scientists have dug numerous trenches along California faults. “We have 31 places where we think we know about past earthquakes,” Biasi explains. “Those places have not produced an earthquake in 100 years.” Based on the data from these locations, it turns out the likelihood that there would be no evidence of a major earthquake in these locations during this timeframe is extremely low. “Many of us think that must mean something.”

But in his presentation, Jackson casts some doubt on these “paleoseismological” studies. He says that not all earthquakes leave their marks and, on the flip side, “there may be other things that also give you a similar kind of displacement.” He specifically points to a study led by Nathan Onderdonk, a geologist at California State University-Long Beach (US), where Onderdonk concludes that one particular displacement might have been the result of a nearby earthquake or groundwater movement, among several other possibilities (Onderdonk et al., 2013). Based on this, Jackson argues that some displacements might be attributed to earthquakes even though weren’t actually caused by them. This would, in turn, cause scientists to overestimate the rate these events occurred in the past. “If, say the rate is only once a century or maybe once every 75 years, then if you go 100 years without having any event” our earthquake hiatus makes a lot more sense.

His main conclusion, though, is that large earthquakes never stopped occurring. By combining instrumental seismic data (e.g. seismographs) and personal accounts of shaking, Jackson points out that there have actually been nine magnitude-7.0 earthquakes in the state since 1918 — they just don’t show up in the paleoseismic records. Biasi, however, says that comparing these different types of data is like comparing “apples and oranges” and explains that paleoseismic data look at specific points on the fault line, whereas the data Jackson used describes a much broader area.

“We said that these [specific] sites on our biggest faults have a hiatus, not that there’s a general hiatus…These places haven’t broken in 100 years. Over there,” Biasi points to somewhere in the distance, “I don’t know.”

Annotated photograph (left) and cartoon (right) of offset sedimentary layers in a paleoseismic trench wall that cuts through a section of the San Andreas Fault. Credit: Kate Scharer, USGS.

Don’t get complacent

It seems the jury might still be out on what this gap in the paleoseismic record might mean. Are the California fault lines overdue? Maybe. But maybe “overdue” is the wrong way to frame this question.

“The potential for strong shaking over most of California is real,” says Biasi, “and the probabilities are high enough that you can’t discount that it will happen in your lifetime.”

Similarly, Jackson ends his presentation with: “We don’t need the compelling word ‘overdue’ to compel action,” and separately says that he doesn’t want to be interpreted as saying there’s no danger. Instead, he offers the following advice: “Make a plan…and then every time you hear the word earthquake, or you feel an earthquake, look at your plan and make an improvement… If you hear the word earthquake, and you don’t do something, then you’re overdue.”

References

Biasi, G. P., & Scharer, K. M. (2019). The Current Unlikely Earthquake Hiatus at California’s Transform Boundary Paleoseismic Sites. Seismological Research Letters, 90(3), 1168-1176

Onderdonk, N. W., Rockwell, T. K., McGill, S. F., & Marliyani, G. I. (2013). Evidence for Seven Surface Ruptures in the Past 1600 Years on the Claremont Fault at Mystic Lake, Northern San Jacinto Fault Zone, California. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 103(1), 519–541

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Network project is a research project which aims at developing and maintaining a crowdsourced smartphone-based earthquake warning system at a global level. Smartphones made available by the population are used to detect the earthquake waves using the on-board accelerometers. When an earthquake is detected, an earthquake warning is issued in order to alert the population not yet reached by the damaging waves of the earthquake.

The project started on January 1, 2013 with the release of the homonymous Android application Earthquake Network. The author of the research project and developer of the smartphone application is Francesco Finazzi of the University of Bergamo, Italy.

Get the app in the Google Play store.

Smartphone network spatial distribution (green and red dots) on December 4, 2015

Meet The Quake-Catcher Network

Quake-Catcher Network

The Quake-Catcher Network is a collaborative initiative for developing the world’s largest, low-cost strong-motion seismic network by utilizing sensors in and attached to internet-connected computers. With your help, the Quake-Catcher Network can provide better understanding of earthquakes, give early warning to schools, emergency response systems, and others. The Quake-Catcher Network also provides educational software designed to help teach about earthquakes and earthquake hazards.

After almost eight years at Stanford, and a year at CalTech, the QCN project is moving to the University of Southern California Dept. of Earth Sciences. QCN will be sponsored by the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) and the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC).

The Quake-Catcher Network is a distributed computing network that links volunteer hosted computers into a real-time motion sensing network. QCN is one of many scientific computing projects that runs on the world-renowned distributed computing platform Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).

The volunteer computers monitor vibrational sensors called MEMS accelerometers, and digitally transmit “triggers” to QCN’s servers whenever strong new motions are observed. QCN’s servers sift through these signals, and determine which ones represent earthquakes, and which ones represent cultural noise (like doors slamming, or trucks driving by).

There are two categories of sensors used by QCN: 1) internal mobile device sensors, and 2) external USB sensors.

Mobile Devices: MEMS sensors are often included in laptops, games, cell phones, and other electronic devices for hardware protection, navigation, and game control. When these devices are still and connected to QCN, QCN software monitors the internal accelerometer for strong new shaking. Unfortunately, these devices are rarely secured to the floor, so they may bounce around when a large earthquake occurs. While this is less than ideal for characterizing the regional ground shaking, many such sensors can still provide useful information about earthquake locations and magnitudes.

USB Sensors: MEMS sensors can be mounted to the floor and connected to a desktop computer via a USB cable. These sensors have several advantages over mobile device sensors. 1) By mounting them to the floor, they measure more reliable shaking than mobile devices. 2) These sensors typically have lower noise and better resolution of 3D motion. 3) Desktops are often left on and do not move. 4) The USB sensor is physically removed from the game, phone, or laptop, so human interaction with the device doesn’t reduce the sensors’ performance. 5) USB sensors can be aligned to North, so we know what direction the horizontal “X” and “Y” axes correspond to.

If you are a science teacher at a K-12 school, please apply for a free USB sensor and accompanying QCN software. QCN has been able to purchase sensors to donate to schools in need. If you are interested in donating to the program or requesting a sensor, click here.

BOINC is a leader in the field(s) of Distributed Computing, Grid Computing and Citizen Cyberscience.BOINC is more properly the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, developed at UC Berkeley.

Earthquake safety is a responsibility shared by billions worldwide. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) provides software so that individuals can join together to improve earthquake monitoring, earthquake awareness, and the science of earthquakes. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) links existing networked laptops and desktops in hopes to form the worlds largest strong-motion seismic network.

Below, the QCN Quake Catcher Network map

ShakeAlert: An Earthquake Early Warning System for the West Coast of the United States

The U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) along with a coalition of State and university partners is developing and testing an earthquake early warning (EEW) system called ShakeAlert for the west coast of the United States. Long term funding must be secured before the system can begin sending general public notifications, however, some limited pilot projects are active and more are being developed. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018.

Watch a video describing how ShakeAlert works in English or Spanish.

The primary project partners include:

United States Geological Survey
California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (CalOES)
California Geological Survey
California Institute of Technology
University of California Berkeley
University of Washington
University of Oregon
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

The Earthquake Threat

Earthquakes pose a national challenge because more than 143 million Americans live in areas of significant seismic risk across 39 states. Most of our Nation’s earthquake risk is concentrated on the West Coast of the United States. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has estimated the average annualized loss from earthquakes, nationwide, to be $5.3 billion, with 77 percent of that figure ($4.1 billion) coming from California, Washington, and Oregon, and 66 percent ($3.5 billion) from California alone. In the next 30 years, California has a 99.7 percent chance of a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake and the Pacific Northwest has a 10 percent chance of a magnitude 8 to 9 megathrust earthquake on the Cascadia subduction zone.

Part of the Solution

Today, the technology exists to detect earthquakes, so quickly, that an alert can reach some areas before strong shaking arrives. The purpose of the ShakeAlert system is to identify and characterize an earthquake a few seconds after it begins, calculate the likely intensity of ground shaking that will result, and deliver warnings to people and infrastructure in harm’s way. This can be done by detecting the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, which rarely causes damage. Using P-wave information, we first estimate the location and the magnitude of the earthquake. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated and a warning is provided to local populations. The method can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, bringing the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage.

Studies of earthquake early warning methods in California have shown that the warning time would range from a few seconds to a few tens of seconds. ShakeAlert can give enough time to slow trains and taxiing planes, to prevent cars from entering bridges and tunnels, to move away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments and to take cover under a desk, or to automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems. Taking such actions before shaking starts can reduce damage and casualties during an earthquake. It can also prevent cascading failures in the aftermath of an event. For example, isolating utilities before shaking starts can reduce the number of fire initiations.

System Goal

The USGS will issue public warnings of potentially damaging earthquakes and provide warning parameter data to government agencies and private users on a region-by-region basis, as soon as the ShakeAlert system, its products, and its parametric data meet minimum quality and reliability standards in those geographic regions. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018. Product availability will expand geographically via ANSS regional seismic networks, such that ShakeAlert products and warnings become available for all regions with dense seismic instrumentation.

Current Status

The West Coast ShakeAlert system is being developed by expanding and upgrading the infrastructure of regional seismic networks that are part of the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS); the California Integrated Seismic Network (CISN) is made up of the Southern California Seismic Network, SCSN) and the Northern California Seismic System, NCSS and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN). This enables the USGS and ANSS to leverage their substantial investment in sensor networks, data telemetry systems, data processing centers, and software for earthquake monitoring activities residing in these network centers. The ShakeAlert system has been sending live alerts to “beta” users in California since January of 2012 and in the Pacific Northwest since February of 2015.

In February of 2016 the USGS, along with its partners, rolled-out the next-generation ShakeAlert early warning test system in California joined by Oregon and Washington in April 2017. This West Coast-wide “production prototype” has been designed for redundant, reliable operations. The system includes geographically distributed servers, and allows for automatic fail-over if connection is lost.

This next-generation system will not yet support public warnings but does allow selected early adopters to develop and deploy pilot implementations that take protective actions triggered by the ShakeAlert notifications in areas with sufficient sensor coverage.

Authorities

The USGS will develop and operate the ShakeAlert system, and issue public notifications under collaborative authorities with FEMA, as part of the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program, as enacted by the Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act of 1977, 42 U.S.C. §§ 7704 SEC. 2.

For More Information

Robert de Groot, ShakeAlert National Coordinator for Communication, Education, and Outreach
rdegroot@usgs.gov
626-583-7225

Learn more about EEW Research

ShakeAlert Fact Sheet

ShakeAlert Implementation Plan

QuakeAlertUSA

About Early Warning Labs, LLC

Early Warning Labs, LLC (EWL) is an Earthquake Early Warning technology developer and integrator located in Santa Monica, CA. EWL is partnered with industry leading GIS provider ESRI, Inc. and is collaborating with the US Government and university partners.

EWL is investing millions of dollars over the next 36 months to complete the final integration and delivery of Earthquake Early Warning to individual consumers, government entities, and commercial users.

EWL’s mission is to improve, expand, and lower the costs of the existing earthquake early warning systems.

EWL is developing a robust cloud server environment to handle low-cost mass distribution of these warnings. In addition, Early Warning Labs is researching and developing automated response standards and systems that allow public and private users to take pre-defined automated actions to protect lives and assets.

EWL has an existing beta R&D test system installed at one of the largest studios in Southern California. The goal of this system is to stress test EWL’s hardware, software, and alert signals while improving latency and reliability.

Earthquake Early Warning Introduction

The United States Geological Survey (USGS), in collaboration with state agencies, university partners, and private industry, is developing an earthquake early warning system (EEW) for the West Coast of the United States called ShakeAlert. The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program aims to mitigate earthquake losses in the United States. Citizens, first responders, and engineers rely on the USGS for accurate and timely information about where earthquakes occur, the ground shaking intensity in different locations, and the likelihood is of future significant ground shaking.

The ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning System recently entered its first phase of operations. The USGS working in partnership with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) is now allowing for the testing of public alerting via apps, Wireless Emergency Alerts, and by other means throughout California.

ShakeAlert partners in Oregon and Washington are working with the USGS to test public alerting in those states sometime in 2020.

ShakeAlert has demonstrated the feasibility of earthquake early warning, from event detection to producing USGS issued ShakeAlerts ® and will continue to undergo testing and will improve over time. In particular, robust and reliable alert delivery pathways for automated actions are currently being developed and implemented by private industry partners for use in California, Oregon, and Washington.

Earthquake Early Warning Background

The objective of an earthquake early warning system is to rapidly detect the initiation of an earthquake, estimate the level of ground shaking intensity to be expected, and issue a warning before significant ground shaking starts. A network of seismic sensors detects the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, and the location and the magnitude of the earthquake is rapidly determined. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated. The system can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, which brings the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage. Warnings will be distributed to local and state public emergency response officials, critical infrastructure, private businesses, and the public. EEW systems have been successfully implemented in Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, and other nations with varying degrees of sophistication and coverage.

Earthquake early warning can provide enough time to:

Instruct students and employees to take a protective action such as Drop, Cover, and Hold On
Initiate mass notification procedures
Open fire-house doors and notify local first responders
Slow and stop trains and taxiing planes
Install measures to prevent/limit additional cars from going on bridges, entering tunnels, and being on freeway overpasses before the shaking starts
Move people away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments
Shut down gas lines, water treatment plants, or nuclear reactors
Automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems

However, earthquake warning notifications must be transmitted without requiring human review and response action must be automated, as the total warning times are short depending on geographic distance and varying soil densities from the epicenter.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

From temblor : “Undersea telecom cables detect ocean earthquakes”

From temblor

April 20, 2021
Lauren Milideo, Ph.D.

Undersea telecom cables detect ocean earthquakes
Posted on April 20, 2021 by Temblor

Researchers used throwaway data from telecom companies to turn submarine telecommunications cables into deep-sea earthquake sensors.

By Lauren Milideo, Ph.D., science writer, (@lwritesscience)

Earthquakes on land often rattle a wide array of seismic sensors, giving researchers plenty of data to analyze. Using these data, seismologists gain a better understanding of how earthquakes occur and where they are more likely to strike in the future. Unfortunately, most of the planet is covered by water and very few seismic sensors monitor the vast oceans. Now, a new study [Science] explores whether underwater telecommunications cables can serve as stand-in sensors and monitor immense spans of Earth’s surface.

Over 70% of Earth’s surface is covered in water, where seismic monitoring equipment is rare. Credit: jack atkinson, Unsplash.

A fresh approach

The idea of using fiber-optic telecommunications cables to sense earthquakes is not new. Researchers have previously used so-called “dark fibers” — fibers not being actively used within a cable — on land to detect seismic waves and on a limited basis underwater. But until now, research utilizing submarine cables has taken place only on short bits of cable because dark fibers are so rare underwater, says Zhongwen Zhan, a seismologist at CalTech’s Seismological Laboratory. These cables are too expensive to have a large number of dark fibers available for other use. This limits the area over which cables can be used to detect earthquakes.

Zhan and a team of researchers sought a different way to use optical-fiber cables to seismically monitor the oceans. Light waves used to transmit data long distances in cables travel in two perpendicular planes, allowing telecom companies to send a large amount of information at once, notes Zhan. The angle between the waves can change if the light signal is perturbed along its journey from one end of the cable to the other. Telecom companies monitor the information at the receiving end of the cables, says Zhan, to ensure that the signal received matches the signal sent and the two perpendicular signals have not interfered with each other along the way. Telecom companies have no other use for this information after this confirmation. The team realized this unused data may have other applications, Zhan says.

Google’s submarine cable detects quakes

The team turned to Google’s 6,525-mile-long (10,500-kilometer) Curie cable, which runs between Los Angeles, California and Valparaiso, Chile. This cable traverses underwater faults and a seismically active zone in the Pacific Ocean. The steady conditions on the seafloor — with few temperature fluctuations or other vibrations common on land — should cause little disruption in the signal traveling through submarine cables. Yet perturbations were still evident in the arriving signals, notes Zhan. The team found that some of these perturbations occurred at the same time as earthquakes detected by more traditional seismological means. The magnitude-7.4 quake that occurred near Oaxaca, Mexico, on June 23, 2020, was one such occurrence.

Deploying the Curie cable. Credit: Google Cloud.

“The cool part about this research is that they don’t rely on installing extra instrumentation on cables that are not being used,” says University of Hamburg [Universität Hamburg](DE) Institute of Geophysics professor and seismologist Céline Hadziioannou.

Because the recorded signal perturbation is integrated along the entire cable length, it is not currently possible to know exactly where along the cable a quake occurred using this type of sensing, says Hadziioannou. The researchers describe the potential use of signal perturbation information from several cables at once to determine a quake’s location. Hadziioannou says that “the approach is still very promising and could be quite powerful for future applications of early detection of the fact that there has been a remote earthquake.” Such information is useful, she says. If a large quake is detected along an undersea cable, existing earthquake early warning systems could be triggered before the seismic waves approach land.

“Many of the bigger earthquakes are happening offshore,” Zhan says. “If you only have stations on land, then you are only looking at them from one side and you are really getting very limited understanding of those earthquakes.” He says that with the tremendous distance between these ocean quakes’ origins and land-based sensors, quick warnings of these quakes are not possible, as they would be if a sensor were located closer to the earthquakes.

Another potential application of this method is tsunami warnings, but this is not yet certain. The researchers did detect ocean waves during their study period, Zhan says. “(A) tsunami is one kind of ocean wave, so we are hopeful that maybe one day it will work for detecting tsunamis,” he notes. No major tsunamis occurred during their nine months of observation, so the team does not yet know if submarine cables can detect tsunamis.

Monitoring the vast oceans

The research holds promise in expanding how seismologists are able to view and learn about these quakes happening so far from traditional seismic sensing networks. “This [submarine] network is already there,” says Zhan – a total of over 1.2 million kilometers, according to CNN. Using even a small percentage of these cables for geophysical research would greatly expand the seismic sensing coverage of Earth’s surface, Zhan notes.

References

Zhan, Z., M. Cantono, V. Kamalov, A. Mecozzi, R. Muller, S. Yin & J.C. Castellanos (2021). Optical Polarization-Based Seismic and Water Wave Sensing on Transoceanic Cables. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abe6648

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Network projectEarthquake Network is a research project which aims at developing and maintaining a crowdsourced smartphone-based earthquake warning system at a global level. Smartphones made available by the population are used to detect the earthquake waves using the on-board accelerometers. When an earthquake is detected, an earthquake warning is issued in order to alert the population not yet reached by the damaging waves of the earthquake.

The project started on January 1, 2013 with the release of the homonymous Android application Earthquake Network. The author of the research project and developer of the smartphone application is Francesco Finazzi of the University of Bergamo, Italy.

Get the app in the Google Play store.

Smartphone network spatial distribution (green and red dots) on December 4, 2015

Meet The Quake-Catcher Network

Quake-Catcher Network

The Quake-Catcher Network is a collaborative initiative for developing the world’s largest, low-cost strong-motion seismic network by utilizing sensors in and attached to internet-connected computers. With your help, the Quake-Catcher Network can provide better understanding of earthquakes, give early warning to schools, emergency response systems, and others. The Quake-Catcher Network also provides educational software designed to help teach about earthquakes and earthquake hazards.

After almost eight years at Stanford, and a year at CalTech, the QCN project is moving to the University of Southern California Dept. of Earth Sciences. QCN will be sponsored by the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) and the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC).

The Quake-Catcher Network is a distributed computing network that links volunteer hosted computers into a real-time motion sensing network. QCN is one of many scientific computing projects that runs on the world-renowned distributed computing platform Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).

The volunteer computers monitor vibrational sensors called MEMS accelerometers, and digitally transmit “triggers” to QCN’s servers whenever strong new motions are observed. QCN’s servers sift through these signals, and determine which ones represent earthquakes, and which ones represent cultural noise (like doors slamming, or trucks driving by).

There are two categories of sensors used by QCN: 1) internal mobile device sensors, and 2) external USB sensors.

Mobile Devices: MEMS sensors are often included in laptops, games, cell phones, and other electronic devices for hardware protection, navigation, and game control. When these devices are still and connected to QCN, QCN software monitors the internal accelerometer for strong new shaking. Unfortunately, these devices are rarely secured to the floor, so they may bounce around when a large earthquake occurs. While this is less than ideal for characterizing the regional ground shaking, many such sensors can still provide useful information about earthquake locations and magnitudes.

USB Sensors: MEMS sensors can be mounted to the floor and connected to a desktop computer via a USB cable. These sensors have several advantages over mobile device sensors. 1) By mounting them to the floor, they measure more reliable shaking than mobile devices. 2) These sensors typically have lower noise and better resolution of 3D motion. 3) Desktops are often left on and do not move. 4) The USB sensor is physically removed from the game, phone, or laptop, so human interaction with the device doesn’t reduce the sensors’ performance. 5) USB sensors can be aligned to North, so we know what direction the horizontal “X” and “Y” axes correspond to.

If you are a science teacher at a K-12 school, please apply for a free USB sensor and accompanying QCN software. QCN has been able to purchase sensors to donate to schools in need. If you are interested in donating to the program or requesting a sensor, click here.

BOINC is a leader in the field(s) of Distributed Computing, Grid Computing and Citizen Cyberscience.BOINC is more properly the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, developed at UC Berkeley.

Earthquake safety is a responsibility shared by billions worldwide. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) provides software so that individuals can join together to improve earthquake monitoring, earthquake awareness, and the science of earthquakes. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) links existing networked laptops and desktops in hopes to form the worlds largest strong-motion seismic network.

Below, the QCN Quake Catcher Network map

ShakeAlert: An Earthquake Early Warning System for the West Coast of the United States

The U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) along with a coalition of State and university partners is developing and testing an earthquake early warning (EEW) system called ShakeAlert for the west coast of the United States. Long term funding must be secured before the system can begin sending general public notifications, however, some limited pilot projects are active and more are being developed. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018.

Watch a video describing how ShakeAlert works in English or Spanish.

The primary project partners include:

United States Geological Survey
California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (CalOES)
California Geological Survey
California Institute of Technology
University of California Berkeley
University of Washington
University of Oregon
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

The Earthquake Threat

Earthquakes pose a national challenge because more than 143 million Americans live in areas of significant seismic risk across 39 states. Most of our Nation’s earthquake risk is concentrated on the West Coast of the United States. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has estimated the average annualized loss from earthquakes, nationwide, to be $5.3 billion, with 77 percent of that figure ($4.1 billion) coming from California, Washington, and Oregon, and 66 percent ($3.5 billion) from California alone. In the next 30 years, California has a 99.7 percent chance of a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake and the Pacific Northwest has a 10 percent chance of a magnitude 8 to 9 megathrust earthquake on the Cascadia subduction zone.

Part of the Solution

Today, the technology exists to detect earthquakes, so quickly, that an alert can reach some areas before strong shaking arrives. The purpose of the ShakeAlert system is to identify and characterize an earthquake a few seconds after it begins, calculate the likely intensity of ground shaking that will result, and deliver warnings to people and infrastructure in harm’s way. This can be done by detecting the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, which rarely causes damage. Using P-wave information, we first estimate the location and the magnitude of the earthquake. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated and a warning is provided to local populations. The method can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, bringing the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage.

Studies of earthquake early warning methods in California have shown that the warning time would range from a few seconds to a few tens of seconds. ShakeAlert can give enough time to slow trains and taxiing planes, to prevent cars from entering bridges and tunnels, to move away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments and to take cover under a desk, or to automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems. Taking such actions before shaking starts can reduce damage and casualties during an earthquake. It can also prevent cascading failures in the aftermath of an event. For example, isolating utilities before shaking starts can reduce the number of fire initiations.

System Goal

The USGS will issue public warnings of potentially damaging earthquakes and provide warning parameter data to government agencies and private users on a region-by-region basis, as soon as the ShakeAlert system, its products, and its parametric data meet minimum quality and reliability standards in those geographic regions. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018. Product availability will expand geographically via ANSS regional seismic networks, such that ShakeAlert products and warnings become available for all regions with dense seismic instrumentation.

Current Status

The West Coast ShakeAlert system is being developed by expanding and upgrading the infrastructure of regional seismic networks that are part of the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS); the California Integrated Seismic Network (CISN) is made up of the Southern California Seismic Network, SCSN) and the Northern California Seismic System, NCSS and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN). This enables the USGS and ANSS to leverage their substantial investment in sensor networks, data telemetry systems, data processing centers, and software for earthquake monitoring activities residing in these network centers. The ShakeAlert system has been sending live alerts to “beta” users in California since January of 2012 and in the Pacific Northwest since February of 2015.

In February of 2016 the USGS, along with its partners, rolled-out the next-generation ShakeAlert early warning test system in California joined by Oregon and Washington in April 2017. This West Coast-wide “production prototype” has been designed for redundant, reliable operations. The system includes geographically distributed servers, and allows for automatic fail-over if connection is lost.

This next-generation system will not yet support public warnings but does allow selected early adopters to develop and deploy pilot implementations that take protective actions triggered by the ShakeAlert notifications in areas with sufficient sensor coverage.

Authorities

The USGS will develop and operate the ShakeAlert system, and issue public notifications under collaborative authorities with FEMA, as part of the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program, as enacted by the Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act of 1977, 42 U.S.C. §§ 7704 SEC. 2.

For More Information

Robert de Groot, ShakeAlert National Coordinator for Communication, Education, and Outreach
rdegroot@usgs.gov
626-583-7225

Learn more about EEW Research

ShakeAlert Fact Sheet

ShakeAlert Implementation Plan

QuakeAlertUSA

About Early Warning Labs, LLC

Early Warning Labs, LLC (EWL) is an Earthquake Early Warning technology developer and integrator located in Santa Monica, CA. EWL is partnered with industry leading GIS provider ESRI, Inc. and is collaborating with the US Government and university partners.

EWL is investing millions of dollars over the next 36 months to complete the final integration and delivery of Earthquake Early Warning to individual consumers, government entities, and commercial users.

EWL’s mission is to improve, expand, and lower the costs of the existing earthquake early warning systems.

EWL is developing a robust cloud server environment to handle low-cost mass distribution of these warnings. In addition, Early Warning Labs is researching and developing automated response standards and systems that allow public and private users to take pre-defined automated actions to protect lives and assets.

EWL has an existing beta R&D test system installed at one of the largest studios in Southern California. The goal of this system is to stress test EWL’s hardware, software, and alert signals while improving latency and reliability.

Earthquake Early Warning Introduction

The United States Geological Survey (USGS), in collaboration with state agencies, university partners, and private industry, is developing an earthquake early warning system (EEW) for the West Coast of the United States called ShakeAlert. The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program aims to mitigate earthquake losses in the United States. Citizens, first responders, and engineers rely on the USGS for accurate and timely information about where earthquakes occur, the ground shaking intensity in different locations, and the likelihood is of future significant ground shaking.

The ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning System recently entered its first phase of operations. The USGS working in partnership with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) is now allowing for the testing of public alerting via apps, Wireless Emergency Alerts, and by other means throughout California.

ShakeAlert partners in Oregon and Washington are working with the USGS to test public alerting in those states sometime in 2020.

ShakeAlert has demonstrated the feasibility of earthquake early warning, from event detection to producing USGS issued ShakeAlerts ® and will continue to undergo testing and will improve over time. In particular, robust and reliable alert delivery pathways for automated actions are currently being developed and implemented by private industry partners for use in California, Oregon, and Washington.

Earthquake Early Warning Background

The objective of an earthquake early warning system is to rapidly detect the initiation of an earthquake, estimate the level of ground shaking intensity to be expected, and issue a warning before significant ground shaking starts. A network of seismic sensors detects the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, and the location and the magnitude of the earthquake is rapidly determined. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated. The system can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, which brings the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage. Warnings will be distributed to local and state public emergency response officials, critical infrastructure, private businesses, and the public. EEW systems have been successfully implemented in Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, and other nations with varying degrees of sophistication and coverage.

Earthquake early warning can provide enough time to:

Instruct students and employees to take a protective action such as Drop, Cover, and Hold On
Initiate mass notification procedures
Open fire-house doors and notify local first responders
Slow and stop trains and taxiing planes
Install measures to prevent/limit additional cars from going on bridges, entering tunnels, and being on freeway overpasses before the shaking starts
Move people away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments
Shut down gas lines, water treatment plants, or nuclear reactors
Automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems

However, earthquake warning notifications must be transmitted without requiring human review and response action must be automated, as the total warning times are short depending on geographic distance and varying soil densities from the epicenter.

From Seismological Society of America via phys.org : “Was Cascadia’s 1700 earthquake part of a sequence of earthquakes?”

From Seismological Society of America

via

phys.org

April 20, 2021

Cascadia’s 1700 earthquake. Credit: https://www.wired.com/2010/01/0126northwest-quake-japan-tsunami/

The famous 1700 Cascadia earthquake that altered the coastline of western North America and sent a tsunami across the Pacific Ocean to Japan may have been one of a sequence of earthquakes, according to new research presented at the Seismological Society of America (SSA)’s 2021 Annual Meeting.

Evidence from coastlines, tree rings and historical documents confirm that there was a massive earthquake in the Cascadia Subduction Zone (US) on January 26, 1700. The prevailing hypothesis is that one megathrust earthquake, estimated at magnitude 8.7 to 9.2 and involving the entire tectonic plate boundary in the region, was responsible for the impacts recorded on both sides of the Pacific.

But after simulating more than 30,000 earthquake ruptures within that magnitude range using software that models the 3-D tectonic geometry of the region, Diego Melgar, the Ann and Lew Williams Chair of Earth Sciences at the University of Oregon (US), concluded that those same impacts could have been produced by a series of earthquakes.

Melgar’s analysis suggests that a partial rupture of as little as 40% of the megathrust boundary in one magnitude 8.7 or larger earthquake could explain some of the North American coastal subsidence and the January 26, 1700 Japan tsunami. But there could have also been as many as four more earthquakes, each magnitude 8 or smaller, that could have produced the rest of the subsidence without causing a tsunami large enough to be recorded in Japan.

His findings do not rule out the possibility that the 1700 Cascadia earthquake was a stand-alone event, but “the January 26, 1700 event, as part of a longer-lived sequence of earthquakes potentially spanning many decades, needs to be considered as a hypothesis that is at least equally likely,” he said.

Knowing whether the 1700 earthquake is one in a sequence has implications for how earthquake hazard maps are created for the region. For instance, calculations for the U.S. Geological Survey hazard maps are based on the Cascadia fault zone fully rupturing about half the time and partially rupturing the other half of the time, Melgar noted.

“But are we really sure that that’s real, or maybe it’s time to revisit that issue?” said Melgar. “Whether there was a partial or full rupture fundamentally drives everything we put on the hazard maps, so we really need to work on that.”

Since the first analyses of the 1700 earthquake, there have been more data from the field, repeated earthquake modeling of the Cascadia Subduction Zone and a better understanding of the physics of megathrust earthquakes—all of which allowed Melgar to revisit the possibilities behind the 1700 earthquake. Researchers also have been writing code for years now to simulate earthquakes and tsunamis in the region, in part to inform earthquake early warning systems like ShakeAlert.

If there was a sequence of earthquakes instead of one earthquake, this might help explain why there is little good geologic evidence of the 1700 event in places such as the Olympic Mountains in Washington State and in southern Oregon, Melgar said.

He noted, however, that these specific areas are difficult to work in, “and may not necessarily be good recorders of the geological signals that paleoseismologists look for.”

Melgar’s models show that even a smaller Cascadia earthquake could cause a tsunami energetic enough to reach Japan. These smaller earthquakes could still pose a significant tsunami risk to North America as well, he cautioned. “They might be less catastrophic, because they don’t affect such a wide area because the rupture is more compact, but we’d still be talking a mega-tsunami.”

He suggested that it could be valuable to revisit and re-do old paleoseismological analyses of the 1700 event, to gain an even clearer picture of how it fits into the overall earthquake history of the region.

“Cascadia actually records earthquake geology much better than many other parts of the world,” Melgar said, “so I think that just going back with modern methods would probably yield a lot of new results.”

See the full article here.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The Seismological Society of America (SSA) is an international scientific society devoted to the advancement of seismology and the understanding of earthquakes for the benefit of society. Founded in 1906, the society has members throughout the world representing seismologists and other geophysicists, geologists, engineers, insurers, and policy-makers in preparedness and safety.

The society was established by academic, government, and other scientific and engineering professionals in the months following the April 18th San Francisco earthquake, with the first meeting of the Board of Directors taking place on December 1, 1906.

The Seismological Society of America publishes the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA), a journal of research in earthquake seismology and related disciplines since 1911, and Seismological Research Letters (SRL), which serves as a forum for informal communication among seismologists, as well as between seismologists and those non-specialists interested in seismology and related disciplines.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Network projectEarthquake Network is a research project which aims at developing and maintaining a crowdsourced smartphone-based earthquake warning system at a global level. Smartphones made available by the population are used to detect the earthquake waves using the on-board accelerometers. When an earthquake is detected, an earthquake warning is issued in order to alert the population not yet reached by the damaging waves of the earthquake.

The project started on January 1, 2013 with the release of the homonymous Android application Earthquake Network. The author of the research project and developer of the smartphone application is Francesco Finazzi of the University of Bergamo, Italy.

Get the app in the Google Play store.

Smartphone network spatial distribution (green and red dots) on December 4, 2015

Meet The Quake-Catcher Network

Quake-Catcher Network

The Quake-Catcher Network is a collaborative initiative for developing the world’s largest, low-cost strong-motion seismic network by utilizing sensors in and attached to internet-connected computers. With your help, the Quake-Catcher Network can provide better understanding of earthquakes, give early warning to schools, emergency response systems, and others. The Quake-Catcher Network also provides educational software designed to help teach about earthquakes and earthquake hazards.

After almost eight years at Stanford, and a year at CalTech, the QCN project is moving to the University of Southern California Dept. of Earth Sciences. QCN will be sponsored by the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) and the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC).

The Quake-Catcher Network is a distributed computing network that links volunteer hosted computers into a real-time motion sensing network. QCN is one of many scientific computing projects that runs on the world-renowned distributed computing platform Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).

The volunteer computers monitor vibrational sensors called MEMS accelerometers, and digitally transmit “triggers” to QCN’s servers whenever strong new motions are observed. QCN’s servers sift through these signals, and determine which ones represent earthquakes, and which ones represent cultural noise (like doors slamming, or trucks driving by).

There are two categories of sensors used by QCN: 1) internal mobile device sensors, and 2) external USB sensors.

Mobile Devices: MEMS sensors are often included in laptops, games, cell phones, and other electronic devices for hardware protection, navigation, and game control. When these devices are still and connected to QCN, QCN software monitors the internal accelerometer for strong new shaking. Unfortunately, these devices are rarely secured to the floor, so they may bounce around when a large earthquake occurs. While this is less than ideal for characterizing the regional ground shaking, many such sensors can still provide useful information about earthquake locations and magnitudes.

USB Sensors: MEMS sensors can be mounted to the floor and connected to a desktop computer via a USB cable. These sensors have several advantages over mobile device sensors. 1) By mounting them to the floor, they measure more reliable shaking than mobile devices. 2) These sensors typically have lower noise and better resolution of 3D motion. 3) Desktops are often left on and do not move. 4) The USB sensor is physically removed from the game, phone, or laptop, so human interaction with the device doesn’t reduce the sensors’ performance. 5) USB sensors can be aligned to North, so we know what direction the horizontal “X” and “Y” axes correspond to.

If you are a science teacher at a K-12 school, please apply for a free USB sensor and accompanying QCN software. QCN has been able to purchase sensors to donate to schools in need. If you are interested in donating to the program or requesting a sensor, click here.

BOINC is a leader in the field(s) of Distributed Computing, Grid Computing and Citizen Cyberscience.BOINC is more properly the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, developed at UC Berkeley.

Earthquake safety is a responsibility shared by billions worldwide. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) provides software so that individuals can join together to improve earthquake monitoring, earthquake awareness, and the science of earthquakes. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) links existing networked laptops and desktops in hopes to form the worlds largest strong-motion seismic network.

Below, the QCN Quake Catcher Network map

ShakeAlert: An Earthquake Early Warning System for the West Coast of the United States

The U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) along with a coalition of State and university partners is developing and testing an earthquake early warning (EEW) system called ShakeAlert for the west coast of the United States. Long term funding must be secured before the system can begin sending general public notifications, however, some limited pilot projects are active and more are being developed. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018.

Watch a video describing how ShakeAlert works in English or Spanish.

The primary project partners include:

United States Geological Survey
California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (CalOES)
California Geological Survey
California Institute of Technology
University of California Berkeley
University of Washington
University of Oregon
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

The Earthquake Threat

Earthquakes pose a national challenge because more than 143 million Americans live in areas of significant seismic risk across 39 states. Most of our Nation’s earthquake risk is concentrated on the West Coast of the United States. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has estimated the average annualized loss from earthquakes, nationwide, to be $5.3 billion, with 77 percent of that figure ($4.1 billion) coming from California, Washington, and Oregon, and 66 percent ($3.5 billion) from California alone. In the next 30 years, California has a 99.7 percent chance of a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake and the Pacific Northwest has a 10 percent chance of a magnitude 8 to 9 megathrust earthquake on the Cascadia subduction zone.

Part of the Solution

Today, the technology exists to detect earthquakes, so quickly, that an alert can reach some areas before strong shaking arrives. The purpose of the ShakeAlert system is to identify and characterize an earthquake a few seconds after it begins, calculate the likely intensity of ground shaking that will result, and deliver warnings to people and infrastructure in harm’s way. This can be done by detecting the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, which rarely causes damage. Using P-wave information, we first estimate the location and the magnitude of the earthquake. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated and a warning is provided to local populations. The method can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, bringing the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage.

Studies of earthquake early warning methods in California have shown that the warning time would range from a few seconds to a few tens of seconds. ShakeAlert can give enough time to slow trains and taxiing planes, to prevent cars from entering bridges and tunnels, to move away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments and to take cover under a desk, or to automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems. Taking such actions before shaking starts can reduce damage and casualties during an earthquake. It can also prevent cascading failures in the aftermath of an event. For example, isolating utilities before shaking starts can reduce the number of fire initiations.

System Goal

The USGS will issue public warnings of potentially damaging earthquakes and provide warning parameter data to government agencies and private users on a region-by-region basis, as soon as the ShakeAlert system, its products, and its parametric data meet minimum quality and reliability standards in those geographic regions. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018. Product availability will expand geographically via ANSS regional seismic networks, such that ShakeAlert products and warnings become available for all regions with dense seismic instrumentation.

Current Status

The West Coast ShakeAlert system is being developed by expanding and upgrading the infrastructure of regional seismic networks that are part of the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS); the California Integrated Seismic Network (CISN) is made up of the Southern California Seismic Network, SCSN) and the Northern California Seismic System, NCSS and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN). This enables the USGS and ANSS to leverage their substantial investment in sensor networks, data telemetry systems, data processing centers, and software for earthquake monitoring activities residing in these network centers. The ShakeAlert system has been sending live alerts to “beta” users in California since January of 2012 and in the Pacific Northwest since February of 2015.

In February of 2016 the USGS, along with its partners, rolled-out the next-generation ShakeAlert early warning test system in California joined by Oregon and Washington in April 2017. This West Coast-wide “production prototype” has been designed for redundant, reliable operations. The system includes geographically distributed servers, and allows for automatic fail-over if connection is lost.

This next-generation system will not yet support public warnings but does allow selected early adopters to develop and deploy pilot implementations that take protective actions triggered by the ShakeAlert notifications in areas with sufficient sensor coverage.

Authorities

The USGS will develop and operate the ShakeAlert system, and issue public notifications under collaborative authorities with FEMA, as part of the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program, as enacted by the Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act of 1977, 42 U.S.C. §§ 7704 SEC. 2.

For More Information

Robert de Groot, ShakeAlert National Coordinator for Communication, Education, and Outreach
rdegroot@usgs.gov
626-583-7225

Learn more about EEW Research

ShakeAlert Fact Sheet

ShakeAlert Implementation Plan

QuakeAlertUSA

About Early Warning Labs, LLC

Early Warning Labs, LLC (EWL) is an Earthquake Early Warning technology developer and integrator located in Santa Monica, CA. EWL is partnered with industry leading GIS provider ESRI, Inc. and is collaborating with the US Government and university partners.

EWL is investing millions of dollars over the next 36 months to complete the final integration and delivery of Earthquake Early Warning to individual consumers, government entities, and commercial users.

EWL’s mission is to improve, expand, and lower the costs of the existing earthquake early warning systems.

EWL is developing a robust cloud server environment to handle low-cost mass distribution of these warnings. In addition, Early Warning Labs is researching and developing automated response standards and systems that allow public and private users to take pre-defined automated actions to protect lives and assets.

EWL has an existing beta R&D test system installed at one of the largest studios in Southern California. The goal of this system is to stress test EWL’s hardware, software, and alert signals while improving latency and reliability.

Earthquake Early Warning Introduction

The United States Geological Survey (USGS), in collaboration with state agencies, university partners, and private industry, is developing an earthquake early warning system (EEW) for the West Coast of the United States called ShakeAlert. The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program aims to mitigate earthquake losses in the United States. Citizens, first responders, and engineers rely on the USGS for accurate and timely information about where earthquakes occur, the ground shaking intensity in different locations, and the likelihood is of future significant ground shaking.

The ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning System recently entered its first phase of operations. The USGS working in partnership with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) is now allowing for the testing of public alerting via apps, Wireless Emergency Alerts, and by other means throughout California.

ShakeAlert partners in Oregon and Washington are working with the USGS to test public alerting in those states sometime in 2020.

ShakeAlert has demonstrated the feasibility of earthquake early warning, from event detection to producing USGS issued ShakeAlerts ® and will continue to undergo testing and will improve over time. In particular, robust and reliable alert delivery pathways for automated actions are currently being developed and implemented by private industry partners for use in California, Oregon, and Washington.

Earthquake Early Warning Background

The objective of an earthquake early warning system is to rapidly detect the initiation of an earthquake, estimate the level of ground shaking intensity to be expected, and issue a warning before significant ground shaking starts. A network of seismic sensors detects the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, and the location and the magnitude of the earthquake is rapidly determined. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated. The system can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, which brings the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage. Warnings will be distributed to local and state public emergency response officials, critical infrastructure, private businesses, and the public. EEW systems have been successfully implemented in Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, and other nations with varying degrees of sophistication and coverage.

Earthquake early warning can provide enough time to:

Instruct students and employees to take a protective action such as Drop, Cover, and Hold On
Initiate mass notification procedures
Open fire-house doors and notify local first responders
Slow and stop trains and taxiing planes
Install measures to prevent/limit additional cars from going on bridges, entering tunnels, and being on freeway overpasses before the shaking starts
Move people away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments
Shut down gas lines, water treatment plants, or nuclear reactors
Automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems

However, earthquake warning notifications must be transmitted without requiring human review and response action must be automated, as the total warning times are short depending on geographic distance and varying soil densities from the epicenter.

From temblor: “New Zealand sees exotic earthquake sequence”

From temblor

March 12, 2021
Hector Gonzalez-Huizar, Ph.D.,Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education at Ensenada [Centro de Investigación Científica y de Educación Superior de Ensenada, CICESE]
Shinji Toda, Ph.D., IRIDeS, Tohoku University

A mystifying series of earthquakes that struck north of New Zealand last week may have resulted from a unique form of seismic triggering.

On March 4, 2021, a series of three large earthquakes struck within six hours of one another in the South Pacific. The earthquakes struck along 560 miles (900 kilometers) of the Kermadec trench, where the Pacific and Australian tectonic plates converge. The first shock — a magnitude-7.3 — struck at 2:27 am local time in the southern part of the trench, just off the northeastern coast of New Zealand’s North Island (Te Ika-a-Māui). The resulting pattern of seismic waves suggests that it was a complex rupture along multiple adjacent faults.

Large earthquakes usually trigger aftershocks on nearby faults and in general, the largest aftershock is one unit of magnitude smaller than its mainshock — a magnitude-6.3 in this case. However, this earthquake was instead followed by both a magnitude-7.4 and a magnitude-8.1 earthquake along the same trench, just four and six hours later, respectively.

This progressive increase in magnitude with time is rare for an individual sequence, particularly for earthquakes this large. When this occurs, the events are simply renamed and we call the largest earthquake in the sequence the mainshock (in this case the magnitude-8.1), and those preceding it are named foreshocks.

Red stars in the map represent the epicenters of the magnitude-7.3, 7.4 and 8.1 earthquakes that occurred on Mach 4, 2021. The blue arrow represents the direction of motion of the Pacific Plate relative to the Australian Plate. The inset figure shows a seismogram for that day, recorded by station ARMA.AU in Australia, highlighting the timing of the three earthquakes.

The short time between the three earthquakes suggests that they were part of a same foreshock-mainshock-aftershock sequence; however, the large distance between the first and the other two earthquakes — more than 560 miles (900 kilometers) — makes it difficult to establish a clear connection.

Triggering of earthquakes

When a fault slips, or ruptures, during an earthquake, rock masses on either side of the fault are displaced. This shifting of mass results in a redistribution of stress within the crust. Ruptures occur because of stress applied to the fault surface and when stress changes, new earthquakes are sometimes triggered on nearby faults. The potential for this so-called “static triggering” following a large earthquake can be quantified using a parameter called Coulomb stress change. In general, a stress change greater than 0.1 bars imposed on a particular fault suggests a high probability that an earthquake will occur within a relatively short period of time (Hill, 2008).

We estimate that the stress change imparted by the first of the earthquakes (the magnitude-7.3) on the rupture surface of the subsequent earthquakes (magnitude-7.4 and magnitude-8.2) was less than 0.01 bars. Therefore, it is very unlikely that the first earthquake caused the other two by static triggering. However, there are other mechanisms that might explain how the first earthquake could have indirectly triggered the other two, regardless of the large distance between them. One of these mechanisms is known as dynamic triggering.

Dynamic triggering of the magnitude-7.4 earthquake

When a fault slips, seismic waves radiate outward from the ruptured area. You feel these waves passing when the ground shakes during an earthquake. Not only can they damage buildings, but these waves can temporally increase the stress on other faults and trigger more earthquakes. Unlike static stress changes, these “dynamic” stress changes are transient, but they can be much larger at great distances.

It is possible that the passing of the seismic waves generated by the magnitude-7.3 caused temporary changes on faults several hundred miles to the north, resulting in their triggering. Given their depth and location relative to known geologic features, the magnitude-8.1 likely occurred on the interface between the two tectonic plates (the so-called “megathrust surface”) and the magnitude-7.4 likely struck on a tear fault in the descending Pacific Plate. We estimate the dynamic stress change imparted by the seismic waves from the magnitude-7.3 on the tear of the rupture area of the magnitude-7.4.

According to our calculations, stress change temporarily alternated between -0.1 to +0.1 bars as the seismic “wavetrain” from the magnitude-7.3 passed over the tear fault. This suggests that these passing seismic waves had a high potential to trigger the magnitude-7.4.

Model shows the temporal (dynamic) Coulomb stress change caused by the passing of the Rayleigh surface seismic waves, from the magnitude-7.3 earthquake, on a tear in the descending slab where the magnitude-7.4 earthquake occurred four hours later. Stress was obtained as in Hill (2008) and Gonzalez-Huizar and Velasco (2011).

The seismic surface waves — a specific type of seismic wave that travels only along earth’s surface — generated by the magnitude-7.3 took only around four minutes to arrive at the location of the magnitude-7.4. Yet the magnitude-7.4 occurred around four hours later. In general, instances of dynamic triggering are difficult to prove, especially when the triggered earthquake does not occur instantaneously with the arrival of the seismic waves. However, cases of “delayed” dynamic triggering are well documented. Seismologists think that in these instances, the stress changes caused by the passing of seismic waves cause permanent damage to fault contacts, a slow slip event or the intrusion of fluids into the faults, resulting in a slowly progressing process that ends with the earthquake triggering (Parsons, 2005; Shelly et al., 2011; Castro et al., 2015).

Interestingly, we found that this area has experienced several instanced of delayed dynamic triggering in the past. We found that at least four other remote, large (greater than magnitude-8.0), recent earthquakes potentially triggered moderate (greater than magnitude-5.0) earthquakes in this area. At least one of these moderate earthquakes occurred within 15 hours after the seismic waves from the triggering earthquakes passed through the area. By comparison, there were no moderate magnitude earthquakes there in the previous three days.

Our preliminary results suggest that earthquakes at the Kermadec trench can be triggered by the small stress fluctuations, like those generated by the passing of seismic waves. Previous studies show that even the small stress changes generated by Earth tides are capable of controlling seismicity along the trench (Hirose et al., 2019), suggesting a high triggering susceptibility.

Map showing the epicenter (black stars) of recent large (greater than magnitude-8.0) earthquakes that potentially triggered moderate (greater than magnitude-5.0) earthquakes near the source of the magnitude-7.4 earthquake (within the area limited by the red square). Also, the epicenter of the three earthquakes discussed in this study are shown (red stars).

Static triggering of the magnitude-8.1 earthquake

The magnitude-7.4 earthquake appears to have triggered the magnitude-8.1 earthquake by static triggering. The distance between their epicenters is only about 30 miles (50 kilometers) and they occurred about 100 minutes apart. In order to investigate how the magnitude-7.4 and magnitude-8.1 earthquakes increased the probability of future earthquakes, we estimated the stress transferred by these two earthquakes to nearby faults. This requires knowing the location, geometry and orientation of the faults — information that can be obtained from the analysis of the seismic waves of past earthquakes that occurred on those faults. Faults or fault segments are represented in maps using focal mechanisms, often referred to as “beachballs,” which indicate the orientation and direction of slip of the fault section that generated the earthquake. A long fault is more accurately represented by a series of slightly different beachballs rather than by a simple plane. We calculated the stress imparted by the magnitude-7.4 and magnitude-8.1 earthquakes on surrounding beachballs. For the magnitude-7.4 earthquake, we find a dense ‘halo’ of red beachballs near the epicenter, indicating that this earthquake transferred significant stress to surrounding active faults, bringing them closer to failure. A simpler way of looking at the static stress transfer is shown in the inset in the lower right. The future magnitude-8.1 rupture surface has a larger area of red than blue, indicating a net increase in its failure stress.

Below, we can see that after the magnitude-8.1, a core of blue beachballs highlights where the stress has dropped. But there are plenty of red beachballs as well, particularly north and south of the ruptured area. So, this sequence might not be over.

Map shows stress transferred to beachballs by the magnitude-7.4 (left panel) and the magnitude-8.1 earthquakes (right panel). The orientation of each beachball provides information on the orientation of the fault (or fault section) to which the stress is transferred, and the direction of the potential slip if an earthquake is triggered. Color represents the amount of stress transferred. Inset shows the stress resolved on the future plane of the magnitude-8.1 caused by the magnitude-7.4 earthquake.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

References

Parsons, T. (2005). A hypothesis for delayed dynamic earthquake triggering. Geophysical Research Letters, 32(4). doi:10.1029/2004GL021811.

Hill, D. P. (2008). Dynamic stresses, Coulomb failure, and remote triggering. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 98(1), 66-92. doi:10.1785/0120070049.

Gonzalez‐Huizar, H., & Velasco, A. A. (2011). Dynamic triggering: Stress modeling and a case study. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 116(B2). doi:10.1029/2009JB007000.

Shelly, D. R., Peng, Z., Hill, D. P., & Aiken, C. (2011). Triggered creep as a possible mechanism for delayed dynamic triggering of tremor and earthquakes. Nature Geoscience, 4(6), 384-388. https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1141.

Castro, R. R., González‐Huízar, H., Ramón Zúñiga, F., Wong, V. M., & Velasco, A. A. (2015). Delayed dynamic triggered seismicity in northern Baja California, México caused by large and remote earthquakes. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 105(4), 1825-1835. doi:10.1785/0120140310.

Hirose, F., Maeda, K., & Kamigaichi, O. (2019). Tidal forcing of interplate earthquakes along the Tonga‐Kermadec Trench. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 124(10), 10498-10521. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019JB018088.

Further Reading

Stein, R. S., Rollins, C., Sevilgen, V., and Hobbs, T. (2019), M 7.1 SoCal earthquake triggers aftershocks up to 100 mi away: What’s next?, Temblor, http://doi.org/10.32858/temblor.038.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Network projectEarthquake Network is a research project which aims at developing and maintaining a crowdsourced smartphone-based earthquake warning system at a global level. Smartphones made available by the population are used to detect the earthquake waves using the on-board accelerometers. When an earthquake is detected, an earthquake warning is issued in order to alert the population not yet reached by the damaging waves of the earthquake.

The project started on January 1, 2013 with the release of the homonymous Android application Earthquake Network. The author of the research project and developer of the smartphone application is Francesco Finazzi of the University of Bergamo, Italy.

Get the app in the Google Play store.

Smartphone network spatial distribution (green and red dots) on December 4, 2015

Meet The Quake-Catcher Network

Quake-Catcher Network

The Quake-Catcher Network is a collaborative initiative for developing the world’s largest, low-cost strong-motion seismic network by utilizing sensors in and attached to internet-connected computers. With your help, the Quake-Catcher Network can provide better understanding of earthquakes, give early warning to schools, emergency response systems, and others. The Quake-Catcher Network also provides educational software designed to help teach about earthquakes and earthquake hazards.

After almost eight years at Stanford, and a year at CalTech, the QCN project is moving to the University of Southern California Dept. of Earth Sciences. QCN will be sponsored by the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) and the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC).

The Quake-Catcher Network is a distributed computing network that links volunteer hosted computers into a real-time motion sensing network. QCN is one of many scientific computing projects that runs on the world-renowned distributed computing platform Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).

The volunteer computers monitor vibrational sensors called MEMS accelerometers, and digitally transmit “triggers” to QCN’s servers whenever strong new motions are observed. QCN’s servers sift through these signals, and determine which ones represent earthquakes, and which ones represent cultural noise (like doors slamming, or trucks driving by).

There are two categories of sensors used by QCN: 1) internal mobile device sensors, and 2) external USB sensors.

Mobile Devices: MEMS sensors are often included in laptops, games, cell phones, and other electronic devices for hardware protection, navigation, and game control. When these devices are still and connected to QCN, QCN software monitors the internal accelerometer for strong new shaking. Unfortunately, these devices are rarely secured to the floor, so they may bounce around when a large earthquake occurs. While this is less than ideal for characterizing the regional ground shaking, many such sensors can still provide useful information about earthquake locations and magnitudes.

USB Sensors: MEMS sensors can be mounted to the floor and connected to a desktop computer via a USB cable. These sensors have several advantages over mobile device sensors. 1) By mounting them to the floor, they measure more reliable shaking than mobile devices. 2) These sensors typically have lower noise and better resolution of 3D motion. 3) Desktops are often left on and do not move. 4) The USB sensor is physically removed from the game, phone, or laptop, so human interaction with the device doesn’t reduce the sensors’ performance. 5) USB sensors can be aligned to North, so we know what direction the horizontal “X” and “Y” axes correspond to.

If you are a science teacher at a K-12 school, please apply for a free USB sensor and accompanying QCN software. QCN has been able to purchase sensors to donate to schools in need. If you are interested in donating to the program or requesting a sensor, click here.

BOINC is a leader in the field(s) of Distributed Computing, Grid Computing and Citizen Cyberscience.BOINC is more properly the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, developed at UC Berkeley.

Earthquake safety is a responsibility shared by billions worldwide. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) provides software so that individuals can join together to improve earthquake monitoring, earthquake awareness, and the science of earthquakes. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) links existing networked laptops and desktops in hopes to form the worlds largest strong-motion seismic network.

Below, the QCN Quake Catcher Network map

ShakeAlert: An Earthquake Early Warning System for the West Coast of the United States

The U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) along with a coalition of State and university partners is developing and testing an earthquake early warning (EEW) system called ShakeAlert for the west coast of the United States. Long term funding must be secured before the system can begin sending general public notifications, however, some limited pilot projects are active and more are being developed. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018.

Watch a video describing how ShakeAlert works in English or Spanish.

The primary project partners include:

United States Geological Survey
California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (CalOES)
California Geological Survey
California Institute of Technology
University of California Berkeley
University of Washington
University of Oregon
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

The Earthquake Threat

Earthquakes pose a national challenge because more than 143 million Americans live in areas of significant seismic risk across 39 states. Most of our Nation’s earthquake risk is concentrated on the West Coast of the United States. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has estimated the average annualized loss from earthquakes, nationwide, to be $5.3 billion, with 77 percent of that figure ($4.1 billion) coming from California, Washington, and Oregon, and 66 percent ($3.5 billion) from California alone. In the next 30 years, California has a 99.7 percent chance of a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake and the Pacific Northwest has a 10 percent chance of a magnitude 8 to 9 megathrust earthquake on the Cascadia subduction zone.

Part of the Solution

Today, the technology exists to detect earthquakes, so quickly, that an alert can reach some areas before strong shaking arrives. The purpose of the ShakeAlert system is to identify and characterize an earthquake a few seconds after it begins, calculate the likely intensity of ground shaking that will result, and deliver warnings to people and infrastructure in harm’s way. This can be done by detecting the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, which rarely causes damage. Using P-wave information, we first estimate the location and the magnitude of the earthquake. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated and a warning is provided to local populations. The method can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, bringing the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage.

Studies of earthquake early warning methods in California have shown that the warning time would range from a few seconds to a few tens of seconds. ShakeAlert can give enough time to slow trains and taxiing planes, to prevent cars from entering bridges and tunnels, to move away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments and to take cover under a desk, or to automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems. Taking such actions before shaking starts can reduce damage and casualties during an earthquake. It can also prevent cascading failures in the aftermath of an event. For example, isolating utilities before shaking starts can reduce the number of fire initiations.

System Goal

The USGS will issue public warnings of potentially damaging earthquakes and provide warning parameter data to government agencies and private users on a region-by-region basis, as soon as the ShakeAlert system, its products, and its parametric data meet minimum quality and reliability standards in those geographic regions. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018. Product availability will expand geographically via ANSS regional seismic networks, such that ShakeAlert products and warnings become available for all regions with dense seismic instrumentation.

Current Status

The West Coast ShakeAlert system is being developed by expanding and upgrading the infrastructure of regional seismic networks that are part of the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS); the California Integrated Seismic Network (CISN) is made up of the Southern California Seismic Network, SCSN) and the Northern California Seismic System, NCSS and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN). This enables the USGS and ANSS to leverage their substantial investment in sensor networks, data telemetry systems, data processing centers, and software for earthquake monitoring activities residing in these network centers. The ShakeAlert system has been sending live alerts to “beta” users in California since January of 2012 and in the Pacific Northwest since February of 2015.

In February of 2016 the USGS, along with its partners, rolled-out the next-generation ShakeAlert early warning test system in California joined by Oregon and Washington in April 2017. This West Coast-wide “production prototype” has been designed for redundant, reliable operations. The system includes geographically distributed servers, and allows for automatic fail-over if connection is lost.

This next-generation system will not yet support public warnings but does allow selected early adopters to develop and deploy pilot implementations that take protective actions triggered by the ShakeAlert notifications in areas with sufficient sensor coverage.

Authorities

The USGS will develop and operate the ShakeAlert system, and issue public notifications under collaborative authorities with FEMA, as part of the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program, as enacted by the Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act of 1977, 42 U.S.C. §§ 7704 SEC. 2.

For More Information

Robert de Groot, ShakeAlert National Coordinator for Communication, Education, and Outreach
rdegroot@usgs.gov
626-583-7225

Learn more about EEW Research

ShakeAlert Fact Sheet

ShakeAlert Implementation Plan

QuakeAlertUSA

About Early Warning Labs, LLC

Early Warning Labs, LLC (EWL) is an Earthquake Early Warning technology developer and integrator located in Santa Monica, CA. EWL is partnered with industry leading GIS provider ESRI, Inc. and is collaborating with the US Government and university partners.

EWL is investing millions of dollars over the next 36 months to complete the final integration and delivery of Earthquake Early Warning to individual consumers, government entities, and commercial users.

EWL’s mission is to improve, expand, and lower the costs of the existing earthquake early warning systems.

EWL is developing a robust cloud server environment to handle low-cost mass distribution of these warnings. In addition, Early Warning Labs is researching and developing automated response standards and systems that allow public and private users to take pre-defined automated actions to protect lives and assets.

EWL has an existing beta R&D test system installed at one of the largest studios in Southern California. The goal of this system is to stress test EWL’s hardware, software, and alert signals while improving latency and reliability.

Earthquake Early Warning Introduction

The United States Geological Survey (USGS), in collaboration with state agencies, university partners, and private industry, is developing an earthquake early warning system (EEW) for the West Coast of the United States called ShakeAlert. The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program aims to mitigate earthquake losses in the United States. Citizens, first responders, and engineers rely on the USGS for accurate and timely information about where earthquakes occur, the ground shaking intensity in different locations, and the likelihood is of future significant ground shaking.

The ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning System recently entered its first phase of operations. The USGS working in partnership with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) is now allowing for the testing of public alerting via apps, Wireless Emergency Alerts, and by other means throughout California.

ShakeAlert partners in Oregon and Washington are working with the USGS to test public alerting in those states sometime in 2020.

ShakeAlert has demonstrated the feasibility of earthquake early warning, from event detection to producing USGS issued ShakeAlerts ® and will continue to undergo testing and will improve over time. In particular, robust and reliable alert delivery pathways for automated actions are currently being developed and implemented by private industry partners for use in California, Oregon, and Washington.

Earthquake Early Warning Background

The objective of an earthquake early warning system is to rapidly detect the initiation of an earthquake, estimate the level of ground shaking intensity to be expected, and issue a warning before significant ground shaking starts. A network of seismic sensors detects the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, and the location and the magnitude of the earthquake is rapidly determined. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated. The system can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, which brings the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage. Warnings will be distributed to local and state public emergency response officials, critical infrastructure, private businesses, and the public. EEW systems have been successfully implemented in Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, and other nations with varying degrees of sophistication and coverage.

Earthquake early warning can provide enough time to:

Instruct students and employees to take a protective action such as Drop, Cover, and Hold On
Initiate mass notification procedures
Open fire-house doors and notify local first responders
Slow and stop trains and taxiing planes
Install measures to prevent/limit additional cars from going on bridges, entering tunnels, and being on freeway overpasses before the shaking starts
Move people away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments
Shut down gas lines, water treatment plants, or nuclear reactors
Automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems

However, earthquake warning notifications must be transmitted without requiring human review and response action must be automated, as the total warning times are short depending on geographic distance and varying soil densities from the epicenter.

From Eos: “An Innovative Approach for Investigating Subduction Slip Budgets”

From AGU

From Eos

19 February 2021
David Shultz

A new 3D model offers a state-of-the-art look at the full spectrum of slip behaviors in the Nankai subduction zone off Japan.

Shikoku Island (bottom center) in Japan is seen in this photo taken from the International Space Station in 2015. Credit: NASA.

The Nankai subduction zone hugs the southeastern curve of Japan and is one of the most seismologically active regions on the planet. The combination of the region’s short seismic cycle—great earthquakes (magnitude 8 or greater) occurring roughly every 100–150 years—and its superb history of geophysical observations makes it an attractive natural observatory for scientists looking to study the evolution of subduction zones during and between great earthquakes. The last major quakes in the region occurred in the mid-1940s, and the decades since have offered opportunities for researchers to pursue innovative geodetic monitoring and modeling.

In a new study, Sherrill and Johnson [Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth] provide the most complete 3D coseismic and postseismic model of the Nankai subduction zone yet, using a new approach that relies on iteratively inverting vertical surface displacement data to characterize movement, or slip, along the fault. Slip at subduction zones displays a range of complex behaviors, such as slip during earthquakes, afterslip following major earthquakes, and episodic tremor and slow slip (ETS) events. Understanding the distribution of these slip behaviors in space and time relative to the area of a fault where earthquakes occur is crucial for assessing seismic hazards at subduction zones.

For Nankai, the researchers teased apart the types of slip that have contributed most to the total slip budget (the amount of slip that must be accommodated in a subduction zone because of tectonic plate convergence). The model also offers new insights into the last large earthquakes at Nankai, allowing the researchers to estimate that the maximum slip during the 1940s events was 7.5 meters. Since then, afterslip has reached a maximum of 2.6 meters, they report.

The slip budget at Nankai comprises coseismic slip, afterslip, short-term and long-term slow slip, and interseismic creep. Below eastern Shikoku Island, the researchers report that the slip budget is nearly met. However, below western Shikoku, there is a considerable deficit—about half the total budget—implying the potential for significant future earthquakes in that area. The study also revealed that long-duration afterslip occurred in the same area of the fault as ETS, an observation that provides new constraints on the frictional properties of this part of the subduction zone.

Beyond what the research reveals about Nankai specifically, the work also offers a state-of-the-art approach for modeling geodetic data across a complete seismic cycle—a feat necessary for improving risk assessments and related policy decisions—that should be applicable to subduction zones around the world.

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Network projectEarthquake Network is a research project which aims at developing and maintaining a crowdsourced smartphone-based earthquake warning system at a global level. Smartphones made available by the population are used to detect the earthquake waves using the on-board accelerometers. When an earthquake is detected, an earthquake warning is issued in order to alert the population not yet reached by the damaging waves of the earthquake.

The project started on January 1, 2013 with the release of the homonymous Android application Earthquake Network. The author of the research project and developer of the smartphone application is Francesco Finazzi of the University of Bergamo, Italy.

Get the app in the Google Play store.

Smartphone network spatial distribution (green and red dots) on December 4, 2015

Meet The Quake-Catcher Network

Quake-Catcher Network

The Quake-Catcher Network is a collaborative initiative for developing the world’s largest, low-cost strong-motion seismic network by utilizing sensors in and attached to internet-connected computers. With your help, the Quake-Catcher Network can provide better understanding of earthquakes, give early warning to schools, emergency response systems, and others. The Quake-Catcher Network also provides educational software designed to help teach about earthquakes and earthquake hazards.

After almost eight years at Stanford, and a year at CalTech, the QCN project is moving to the University of Southern California Dept. of Earth Sciences. QCN will be sponsored by the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) and the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC).

The Quake-Catcher Network is a distributed computing network that links volunteer hosted computers into a real-time motion sensing network. QCN is one of many scientific computing projects that runs on the world-renowned distributed computing platform Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).

The volunteer computers monitor vibrational sensors called MEMS accelerometers, and digitally transmit “triggers” to QCN’s servers whenever strong new motions are observed. QCN’s servers sift through these signals, and determine which ones represent earthquakes, and which ones represent cultural noise (like doors slamming, or trucks driving by).

There are two categories of sensors used by QCN: 1) internal mobile device sensors, and 2) external USB sensors.

Mobile Devices: MEMS sensors are often included in laptops, games, cell phones, and other electronic devices for hardware protection, navigation, and game control. When these devices are still and connected to QCN, QCN software monitors the internal accelerometer for strong new shaking. Unfortunately, these devices are rarely secured to the floor, so they may bounce around when a large earthquake occurs. While this is less than ideal for characterizing the regional ground shaking, many such sensors can still provide useful information about earthquake locations and magnitudes.

USB Sensors: MEMS sensors can be mounted to the floor and connected to a desktop computer via a USB cable. These sensors have several advantages over mobile device sensors. 1) By mounting them to the floor, they measure more reliable shaking than mobile devices. 2) These sensors typically have lower noise and better resolution of 3D motion. 3) Desktops are often left on and do not move. 4) The USB sensor is physically removed from the game, phone, or laptop, so human interaction with the device doesn’t reduce the sensors’ performance. 5) USB sensors can be aligned to North, so we know what direction the horizontal “X” and “Y” axes correspond to.

If you are a science teacher at a K-12 school, please apply for a free USB sensor and accompanying QCN software. QCN has been able to purchase sensors to donate to schools in need. If you are interested in donating to the program or requesting a sensor, click here.

BOINC is a leader in the field(s) of Distributed Computing, Grid Computing and Citizen Cyberscience.BOINC is more properly the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, developed at UC Berkeley.

Earthquake safety is a responsibility shared by billions worldwide. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) provides software so that individuals can join together to improve earthquake monitoring, earthquake awareness, and the science of earthquakes. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) links existing networked laptops and desktops in hopes to form the worlds largest strong-motion seismic network.

Below, the QCN Quake Catcher Network map

ShakeAlert: An Earthquake Early Warning System for the West Coast of the United States

The U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) along with a coalition of State and university partners is developing and testing an earthquake early warning (EEW) system called ShakeAlert for the west coast of the United States. Long term funding must be secured before the system can begin sending general public notifications, however, some limited pilot projects are active and more are being developed. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018.

Watch a video describing how ShakeAlert works in English or Spanish.

The primary project partners include:

United States Geological Survey
California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (CalOES)
California Geological Survey
California Institute of Technology
University of California Berkeley
University of Washington
University of Oregon
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

The Earthquake Threat

Earthquakes pose a national challenge because more than 143 million Americans live in areas of significant seismic risk across 39 states. Most of our Nation’s earthquake risk is concentrated on the West Coast of the United States. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has estimated the average annualized loss from earthquakes, nationwide, to be $5.3 billion, with 77 percent of that figure ($4.1 billion) coming from California, Washington, and Oregon, and 66 percent ($3.5 billion) from California alone. In the next 30 years, California has a 99.7 percent chance of a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake and the Pacific Northwest has a 10 percent chance of a magnitude 8 to 9 megathrust earthquake on the Cascadia subduction zone.

Part of the Solution

Today, the technology exists to detect earthquakes, so quickly, that an alert can reach some areas before strong shaking arrives. The purpose of the ShakeAlert system is to identify and characterize an earthquake a few seconds after it begins, calculate the likely intensity of ground shaking that will result, and deliver warnings to people and infrastructure in harm’s way. This can be done by detecting the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, which rarely causes damage. Using P-wave information, we first estimate the location and the magnitude of the earthquake. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated and a warning is provided to local populations. The method can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, bringing the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage.

Studies of earthquake early warning methods in California have shown that the warning time would range from a few seconds to a few tens of seconds. ShakeAlert can give enough time to slow trains and taxiing planes, to prevent cars from entering bridges and tunnels, to move away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments and to take cover under a desk, or to automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems. Taking such actions before shaking starts can reduce damage and casualties during an earthquake. It can also prevent cascading failures in the aftermath of an event. For example, isolating utilities before shaking starts can reduce the number of fire initiations.

System Goal

The USGS will issue public warnings of potentially damaging earthquakes and provide warning parameter data to government agencies and private users on a region-by-region basis, as soon as the ShakeAlert system, its products, and its parametric data meet minimum quality and reliability standards in those geographic regions. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018. Product availability will expand geographically via ANSS regional seismic networks, such that ShakeAlert products and warnings become available for all regions with dense seismic instrumentation.

Current Status

The West Coast ShakeAlert system is being developed by expanding and upgrading the infrastructure of regional seismic networks that are part of the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS); the California Integrated Seismic Network (CISN) is made up of the Southern California Seismic Network, SCSN) and the Northern California Seismic System, NCSS and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN). This enables the USGS and ANSS to leverage their substantial investment in sensor networks, data telemetry systems, data processing centers, and software for earthquake monitoring activities residing in these network centers. The ShakeAlert system has been sending live alerts to “beta” users in California since January of 2012 and in the Pacific Northwest since February of 2015.

In February of 2016 the USGS, along with its partners, rolled-out the next-generation ShakeAlert early warning test system in California joined by Oregon and Washington in April 2017. This West Coast-wide “production prototype” has been designed for redundant, reliable operations. The system includes geographically distributed servers, and allows for automatic fail-over if connection is lost.

This next-generation system will not yet support public warnings but does allow selected early adopters to develop and deploy pilot implementations that take protective actions triggered by the ShakeAlert notifications in areas with sufficient sensor coverage.

Authorities

The USGS will develop and operate the ShakeAlert system, and issue public notifications under collaborative authorities with FEMA, as part of the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program, as enacted by the Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act of 1977, 42 U.S.C. §§ 7704 SEC. 2.

For More Information

Robert de Groot, ShakeAlert National Coordinator for Communication, Education, and Outreach
rdegroot@usgs.gov
626-583-7225

Learn more about EEW Research

ShakeAlert Fact Sheet

ShakeAlert Implementation Plan

QuakeAlertUSA

About Early Warning Labs, LLC

Early Warning Labs, LLC (EWL) is an Earthquake Early Warning technology developer and integrator located in Santa Monica, CA. EWL is partnered with industry leading GIS provider ESRI, Inc. and is collaborating with the US Government and university partners.

EWL is investing millions of dollars over the next 36 months to complete the final integration and delivery of Earthquake Early Warning to individual consumers, government entities, and commercial users.

EWL’s mission is to improve, expand, and lower the costs of the existing earthquake early warning systems.

EWL is developing a robust cloud server environment to handle low-cost mass distribution of these warnings. In addition, Early Warning Labs is researching and developing automated response standards and systems that allow public and private users to take pre-defined automated actions to protect lives and assets.

EWL has an existing beta R&D test system installed at one of the largest studios in Southern California. The goal of this system is to stress test EWL’s hardware, software, and alert signals while improving latency and reliability.

Earthquake Early Warning Introduction

The United States Geological Survey (USGS), in collaboration with state agencies, university partners, and private industry, is developing an earthquake early warning system (EEW) for the West Coast of the United States called ShakeAlert. The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program aims to mitigate earthquake losses in the United States. Citizens, first responders, and engineers rely on the USGS for accurate and timely information about where earthquakes occur, the ground shaking intensity in different locations, and the likelihood is of future significant ground shaking.

The ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning System recently entered its first phase of operations. The USGS working in partnership with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) is now allowing for the testing of public alerting via apps, Wireless Emergency Alerts, and by other means throughout California.

ShakeAlert partners in Oregon and Washington are working with the USGS to test public alerting in those states sometime in 2020.

ShakeAlert has demonstrated the feasibility of earthquake early warning, from event detection to producing USGS issued ShakeAlerts ® and will continue to undergo testing and will improve over time. In particular, robust and reliable alert delivery pathways for automated actions are currently being developed and implemented by private industry partners for use in California, Oregon, and Washington.

Earthquake Early Warning Background

The objective of an earthquake early warning system is to rapidly detect the initiation of an earthquake, estimate the level of ground shaking intensity to be expected, and issue a warning before significant ground shaking starts. A network of seismic sensors detects the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, and the location and the magnitude of the earthquake is rapidly determined. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated. The system can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, which brings the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage. Warnings will be distributed to local and state public emergency response officials, critical infrastructure, private businesses, and the public. EEW systems have been successfully implemented in Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, and other nations with varying degrees of sophistication and coverage.

Earthquake early warning can provide enough time to:

Instruct students and employees to take a protective action such as Drop, Cover, and Hold On
Initiate mass notification procedures
Open fire-house doors and notify local first responders
Slow and stop trains and taxiing planes
Install measures to prevent/limit additional cars from going on bridges, entering tunnels, and being on freeway overpasses before the shaking starts
Move people away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments
Shut down gas lines, water treatment plants, or nuclear reactors
Automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems

However, earthquake warning notifications must be transmitted without requiring human review and response action must be automated, as the total warning times are short depending on geographic distance and varying soil densities from the epicenter.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Eos is the leading source for trustworthy news and perspectives about the Earth and space sciences and their impact. Its namesake is Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, who represents the light shed on understanding our planet and its environment in space by the Earth and space sciences.

From University of Washington: “Q&A- ShakeAlert earthquake early warning system arriving in Pacific Northwest”

From University of Washington

ShakeAlert earthquake early warning system arriving in Pacific Northwest.

After years in development, an earthquake early warning system known as ShakeAlert is on the cusp of being released in Oregon and Washington. The system that spans the West Coast was launched in California in late 2019. It launches to the public in Oregon on March 11, the 10th anniversary of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and in Washington in May.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
February 17, 2021
Hannah Hickey

More Information
Harold Tobin
htobin@uw.edu

Bill Steele,
communications director at
Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, at
wsteele@uw.edu
206-685-5880.

After years in development, an earthquake early warning system known as ShakeAlert is on the cusp of being released in Oregon and Washington. The system that spans the West Coast was launched in California in late 2019. It launches to the public in Oregon on March 11, the 10th anniversary of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and in Washington in May.

The system was developed through a partnership between the University of Washington and other West Coast universities and the USGS working with state emergency management districts. The system uses ground sensors across the region to detect the first signals from a rupturing earthquake and then sends that information to computers and phones, providing seconds to tens of seconds of warning of an imminent earthquake.

UW News sat down with Harold Tobin, professor of Earth and space sciences and director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, to learn more.

Karl Hagel and Pat McChesney, field engineers with the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network team at the University of Washington, install earthquake monitoring equipment on the slopes of Mount St. Helens, with Mount Hood in the distance. Credit: Marc Biundo/University of Washington.

How can people in the Puget Sound sign up for the test taking place in late February? And how can Washingtonians sign up for the actual earthquake early warning system when it goes live in May?

Washington EMD and USGS have developed a simulated earthquake warning test message they will broadcast Feb. 25 on the Wireless Emergency Alert system, the nation’s universal alerting system. The test will evaluate how the WEA system performs for earthquake early warning in the Puget Sound area. For technical reasons, WEA does not distribute alerts as fast as we’d like for earthquake warnings. A delay of 30 seconds might not matter for an Amber Alert, but for earthquake warning systems that would mean many alerts would arrive after the strong shaking has begun.

You have to opt in for the test, which is for users in Pierce, King and Thurston counties. Once ShakeAlert goes live in May, earthquake alerts will go to anyone in Washington who hasn’t opted out of the Wireless Emergency Alert system.

There will be two other ways to get earthquake alerts. If you have an Android phone device, Google has embedded it in the mobile operating system in late 2020. So those devices in California are getting alerts now, and we expect Android alerts will go live in Washington in May. We hope other phone operating systems will follow suit. Another option will be to install on your device an app, like QuakeAlertUSA, built by one of the licensed ShakeAlert partners. We hope several of these apps will be available by the end of the year.

Washington ShakeAlert is a collaboration between the USGS, Washington Emergency Management and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network[PNSN]. Can you explain how the three groups collaborate?

ShakeAlert is operated by the USGS in partnership with the PNSN and California seismic networks. The data that is generated to detect the earthquakes in Washington and Oregon comes from the PNSN, the seismic network operated out of the UW and the University of Oregon. We are direct partners in the research and development of this system. At the UW, we operate one of three computer systems that ingest the data and issue the alert messages; the others are at UC Berkeley and Caltech. There’s a strong partnership between the PNSN and the USGS on earthquake detection and the continuing development of the system that issues the warnings. Washington Emergency Management is responsible for public safety, and so they are determining the types of public alerts that will be released, the messaging, public education and appropriate responses.

This is a great example of a partnership among all those entities. We are all working toward this same goal, of increasing earthquake awareness and public safety.

The PNSN began testing the system back in 2015 with early adopters. What have you learned from that experience?

A system like this is complicated, and will reach everyone, so we have to test it really extensively. We’re decreasing the number of false or missed alerts in our beta system. Just seeing more and more events has allowed us to improve the algorithms, to distinguish between a false alarm and a real signal, and to better pinpoint the magnitude and location of the earthquake. A typical time frame is now 2 seconds for our computers to decide on the location and magnitude of the earthquake and to generate the alert — the pace that that happens is unbelievable.

Now that the system is about to go public, how will other businesses, schools, organizations or agencies be able to incorporate these alerts into their emergency plans?

The USGS licenses partners to develop products that take the ShakeAlert message and can connect to other systems.

ShakeAlert® License to Operate Partners

Below is a list of License to Operate partners. They are currently the only partners with a License to Operate (e.g. have commercially or non-commercially available products or services that are powered by ShakeAlert®.

• Early Warning Labs: Josh Bashioum – info@earlywarninglabs.com

• Google: The Android Earthquake Alerts team – android-usgs-external@google.com

• MyShake™: Richard Allen – rallen@berkeley.edu

• RH2 Engineering: Rick Ballard – rballard@rh2.com

• San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART): Chung-Soo Doo – cdoo@bart.gov

• SkyAlert: Alejandro Cantu – alejandro@skyalertusa.com

• Valcom: Roger Steinberg – rsteinberg@valcom.com

• Varius: Dan Ervin – dan.ervin@variusinc.com

Note: The USGS does not directly or indirectly endorse any product or service provided, or to be provided, by these Licensees.

A number of those licensed partners offer systems that can be adopted, such as a box that can be hooked up to a school PA system and automatically issue a prerecorded message that alerts students to drop, cover and hold on. Any business that has staff in a facility can think about how they can incorporate earthquake early warnings into their own facility. ShakeAlert messages can also trigger automated actions to pause manufacturing processes, move elevators to the next floor and open the doors, close valves on reservoirs, and initiate other loss-reduction actions.

What should someone do when they get their first “real” alert?

When someone gets an alert, the appropriate action to take is to drop, cover and hold on. It’s important to get under a protective cover. Most injuries from earthquakes in the U.S. are not from the catastrophic collapse of a building but from falling objects – lights, ceiling tiles, etc.

If you’re driving in a car, the appropriate action would be to pull over and stop the car, if possible. If you’re in a building, stay in a building. The message is really to brace yourself — drop, cover and hold on. That message, to pause and protect yourself, is key. (Washington Emergency Management has more tips here.)

What about British Columbia? Will the earthquake early warning system extend across the border?

Natural Resources Canada is working in parallel to develop an earthquake early warning system. We already use data from seismometers in Canada, and we incorporate that information in our alerts — earthquake waves don’t stop at the border.

Can we expect any improvements or changes coming down the line?

Yes, we’re improving the system all the time. We are going live with this system because we know that it works, but we’re also continuously improving the system. We have hundreds of seismic stations in place but we’re adding dozens more, so that we can optimize the network to detect earthquakes wherever they occur within the region.

We’re also continuously improving the computer algorithms that detect the raw data and decide where and how big the earthquake is. Once it goes live, there will be no pause in improving the system. We would also love to add more offshore detection systems, since offshore quakes are a challenge to detect accurately.

For me, this is an exciting example of science to action, of things that are driven by fundamental science and research in seismology that show the way to something that can do some tangible good for society — to increase public safety. It’s exciting to see that happening with the ShakeAlert system.

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Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Alert

Earthquake Network projectEarthquake Network is a research project which aims at developing and maintaining a crowdsourced smartphone-based earthquake warning system at a global level. Smartphones made available by the population are used to detect the earthquake waves using the on-board accelerometers. When an earthquake is detected, an earthquake warning is issued in order to alert the population not yet reached by the damaging waves of the earthquake.

The project started on January 1, 2013 with the release of the homonymous Android application Earthquake Network. The author of the research project and developer of the smartphone application is Francesco Finazzi of the University of Bergamo, Italy.

Get the app in the Google Play store.

Smartphone network spatial distribution (green and red dots) on December 4, 2015

Meet The Quake-Catcher Network

Quake-Catcher Network

The Quake-Catcher Network is a collaborative initiative for developing the world’s largest, low-cost strong-motion seismic network by utilizing sensors in and attached to internet-connected computers. With your help, the Quake-Catcher Network can provide better understanding of earthquakes, give early warning to schools, emergency response systems, and others. The Quake-Catcher Network also provides educational software designed to help teach about earthquakes and earthquake hazards.

After almost eight years at Stanford, and a year at CalTech, the QCN project is moving to the University of Southern California Dept. of Earth Sciences. QCN will be sponsored by the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) and the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC).

The Quake-Catcher Network is a distributed computing network that links volunteer hosted computers into a real-time motion sensing network. QCN is one of many scientific computing projects that runs on the world-renowned distributed computing platform Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).

The volunteer computers monitor vibrational sensors called MEMS accelerometers, and digitally transmit “triggers” to QCN’s servers whenever strong new motions are observed. QCN’s servers sift through these signals, and determine which ones represent earthquakes, and which ones represent cultural noise (like doors slamming, or trucks driving by).

There are two categories of sensors used by QCN: 1) internal mobile device sensors, and 2) external USB sensors.

Mobile Devices: MEMS sensors are often included in laptops, games, cell phones, and other electronic devices for hardware protection, navigation, and game control. When these devices are still and connected to QCN, QCN software monitors the internal accelerometer for strong new shaking. Unfortunately, these devices are rarely secured to the floor, so they may bounce around when a large earthquake occurs. While this is less than ideal for characterizing the regional ground shaking, many such sensors can still provide useful information about earthquake locations and magnitudes.

USB Sensors: MEMS sensors can be mounted to the floor and connected to a desktop computer via a USB cable. These sensors have several advantages over mobile device sensors. 1) By mounting them to the floor, they measure more reliable shaking than mobile devices. 2) These sensors typically have lower noise and better resolution of 3D motion. 3) Desktops are often left on and do not move. 4) The USB sensor is physically removed from the game, phone, or laptop, so human interaction with the device doesn’t reduce the sensors’ performance. 5) USB sensors can be aligned to North, so we know what direction the horizontal “X” and “Y” axes correspond to.

If you are a science teacher at a K-12 school, please apply for a free USB sensor and accompanying QCN software. QCN has been able to purchase sensors to donate to schools in need. If you are interested in donating to the program or requesting a sensor, click here.

BOINC is a leader in the field(s) of Distributed Computing, Grid Computing and Citizen Cyberscience.BOINC is more properly the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, developed at UC Berkeley.

Earthquake safety is a responsibility shared by billions worldwide. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) provides software so that individuals can join together to improve earthquake monitoring, earthquake awareness, and the science of earthquakes. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) links existing networked laptops and desktops in hopes to form the worlds largest strong-motion seismic network.

Below, the QCN Quake Catcher Network map

ShakeAlert: An Earthquake Early Warning System for the West Coast of the United States

The U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) along with a coalition of State and university partners is developing and testing an earthquake early warning (EEW) system called ShakeAlert for the west coast of the United States. Long term funding must be secured before the system can begin sending general public notifications, however, some limited pilot projects are active and more are being developed. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018.

Watch a video describing how ShakeAlert works in English or Spanish.

The primary project partners include:

United States Geological Survey
California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (CalOES)
California Geological Survey
California Institute of Technology
University of California Berkeley
University of Washington
University of Oregon
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

The Earthquake Threat

Earthquakes pose a national challenge because more than 143 million Americans live in areas of significant seismic risk across 39 states. Most of our Nation’s earthquake risk is concentrated on the West Coast of the United States. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has estimated the average annualized loss from earthquakes, nationwide, to be $5.3 billion, with 77 percent of that figure ($4.1 billion) coming from California, Washington, and Oregon, and 66 percent ($3.5 billion) from California alone. In the next 30 years, California has a 99.7 percent chance of a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake and the Pacific Northwest has a 10 percent chance of a magnitude 8 to 9 megathrust earthquake on the Cascadia subduction zone.

Part of the Solution

Today, the technology exists to detect earthquakes, so quickly, that an alert can reach some areas before strong shaking arrives. The purpose of the ShakeAlert system is to identify and characterize an earthquake a few seconds after it begins, calculate the likely intensity of ground shaking that will result, and deliver warnings to people and infrastructure in harm’s way. This can be done by detecting the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, which rarely causes damage. Using P-wave information, we first estimate the location and the magnitude of the earthquake. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated and a warning is provided to local populations. The method can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, bringing the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage.

Studies of earthquake early warning methods in California have shown that the warning time would range from a few seconds to a few tens of seconds. ShakeAlert can give enough time to slow trains and taxiing planes, to prevent cars from entering bridges and tunnels, to move away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments and to take cover under a desk, or to automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems. Taking such actions before shaking starts can reduce damage and casualties during an earthquake. It can also prevent cascading failures in the aftermath of an event. For example, isolating utilities before shaking starts can reduce the number of fire initiations.

System Goal

The USGS will issue public warnings of potentially damaging earthquakes and provide warning parameter data to government agencies and private users on a region-by-region basis, as soon as the ShakeAlert system, its products, and its parametric data meet minimum quality and reliability standards in those geographic regions. The USGS has set the goal of beginning limited public notifications in 2018. Product availability will expand geographically via ANSS regional seismic networks, such that ShakeAlert products and warnings become available for all regions with dense seismic instrumentation.

Current Status

The West Coast ShakeAlert system is being developed by expanding and upgrading the infrastructure of regional seismic networks that are part of the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS); the California Integrated Seismic Network (CISN) is made up of the Southern California Seismic Network, SCSN) and the Northern California Seismic System, NCSS and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN). This enables the USGS and ANSS to leverage their substantial investment in sensor networks, data telemetry systems, data processing centers, and software for earthquake monitoring activities residing in these network centers. The ShakeAlert system has been sending live alerts to “beta” users in California since January of 2012 and in the Pacific Northwest since February of 2015.

In February of 2016 the USGS, along with its partners, rolled-out the next-generation ShakeAlert early warning test system in California joined by Oregon and Washington in April 2017. This West Coast-wide “production prototype” has been designed for redundant, reliable operations. The system includes geographically distributed servers, and allows for automatic fail-over if connection is lost.

This next-generation system will not yet support public warnings but does allow selected early adopters to develop and deploy pilot implementations that take protective actions triggered by the ShakeAlert notifications in areas with sufficient sensor coverage.

Authorities

The USGS will develop and operate the ShakeAlert system, and issue public notifications under collaborative authorities with FEMA, as part of the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program, as enacted by the Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act of 1977, 42 U.S.C. §§ 7704 SEC. 2.

For More Information

Robert de Groot, ShakeAlert National Coordinator for Communication, Education, and Outreach
rdegroot@usgs.gov
626-583-7225

Learn more about EEW Research

ShakeAlert Fact Sheet

ShakeAlert Implementation Plan

QuakeAlertUSA mobile app

About Early Warning Labs, LLC

Early Warning Labs, LLC (EWL) is an Earthquake Early Warning technology developer and integrator located in Santa Monica, CA. EWL is partnered with industry leading GIS provider ESRI, Inc. and is collaborating with the US Government and university partners.

EWL is investing millions of dollars over the next 36 months to complete the final integration and delivery of Earthquake Early Warning to individual consumers, government entities, and commercial users.

EWL’s mission is to improve, expand, and lower the costs of the existing earthquake early warning systems.

EWL is developing a robust cloud server environment to handle low-cost mass distribution of these warnings. In addition, Early Warning Labs is researching and developing automated response standards and systems that allow public and private users to take pre-defined automated actions to protect lives and assets.

EWL has an existing beta R&D test system installed at one of the largest studios in Southern California. The goal of this system is to stress test EWL’s hardware, software, and alert signals while improving latency and reliability.

Earthquake Early Warning Introduction

The United States Geological Survey (USGS), in collaboration with state agencies, university partners, and private industry, is developing an earthquake early warning system (EEW) for the West Coast of the United States called ShakeAlert. The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program aims to mitigate earthquake losses in the United States. Citizens, first responders, and engineers rely on the USGS for accurate and timely information about where earthquakes occur, the ground shaking intensity in different locations, and the likelihood is of future significant ground shaking.

The ShakeAlert Earthquake Early Warning System recently entered its first phase of operations. The USGS working in partnership with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) is now allowing for the testing of public alerting via apps, Wireless Emergency Alerts, and by other means throughout California.

ShakeAlert partners in Oregon and Washington are working with the USGS to test public alerting in those states sometime in 2020.

ShakeAlert has demonstrated the feasibility of earthquake early warning, from event detection to producing USGS issued ShakeAlerts ® and will continue to undergo testing and will improve over time. In particular, robust and reliable alert delivery pathways for automated actions are currently being developed and implemented by private industry partners for use in California, Oregon, and Washington.

Earthquake Early Warning Background

The objective of an earthquake early warning system is to rapidly detect the initiation of an earthquake, estimate the level of ground shaking intensity to be expected, and issue a warning before significant ground shaking starts. A network of seismic sensors detects the first energy to radiate from an earthquake, the P-wave energy, and the location and the magnitude of the earthquake is rapidly determined. Then, the anticipated ground shaking across the region to be affected is estimated. The system can provide warning before the S-wave arrives, which brings the strong shaking that usually causes most of the damage. Warnings will be distributed to local and state public emergency response officials, critical infrastructure, private businesses, and the public. EEW systems have been successfully implemented in Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, and other nations with varying degrees of sophistication and coverage.

Earthquake early warning can provide enough time to:

Instruct students and employees to take a protective action such as Drop, Cover, and Hold On
Initiate mass notification procedures
Open fire-house doors and notify local first responders
Slow and stop trains and taxiing planes
Install measures to prevent/limit additional cars from going on bridges, entering tunnels, and being on freeway overpasses before the shaking starts
Move people away from dangerous machines or chemicals in work environments
Shut down gas lines, water treatment plants, or nuclear reactors
Automatically shut down and isolate industrial systems

However, earthquake warning notifications must be transmitted without requiring human review and response action must be automated, as the total warning times are short depending on geographic distance and varying soil densities from the epicenter.

See the full article here .

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