From temblor: “The Whistle: Are We Ready for the Big One?”

From temblor

October 24, 2018

Jason R. Patton, Ph.D.
Ross Stein, Ph.D.
Volkan Sevilgen, M.Sc.

It Has Happened Before

The southern San Andreas fault (SSAF) is a plate boundary strike-slip fault, where the Pacific plate moves northward relative to the North America plate. There have been large earthquakes on this fault in historic time, including the 1857 Forth Tejon earthquake. This 1857 earthquake is estimated to have been a magnitude 7.9 earthquake (larger than the recent earthquake in Sulawesi, Indonesia). There is also a record of prehistoric earthquakes on this fault, spanning the past 5000 years (Weldon et al., 2004; Sharer et al., 2007). These authors have determined that the average time between earthquakes on the SSAF is 105 years. However, the time between earthquakes ranges from 31 – 165 years. This large variation in inter-event time periods makes it more difficult to know when the next “Big One” will happen.

The USGS prepares earthquake scenarios based on our knowledge about past earthquakes and how future earthquakes may behave based on our empirical knowledge. Below is a USGS scenario map for the part of the SSAF that ruptured in the 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake. The color scale represent relative earthquake shaking intensity based on the Modified Mercalli Intensity scale. Warmer colors represent areas of stronger ground shaking. While the map below is based on a computer model, this is a good estimate of how strongly the ground shook in 1957. Note how the strongest ground shaking is adjacent to the fault.

USGS Shakemap scenario map for the southern San Andreas fault, showing an estimate of shaking intensity from an earthquake similar in length and magnitude to the 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake. The part of the fault that slips in this scenario earthquake is shown as a black line, very similar to the known extent of the 1857 earthquake.

Several governments and non-governmental organizations prepare estimates of seismic hazard so that people can ensure their building codes are designed to mitigate these hazards. The Global Earthquake Model (GEM) is an example of our efforts to estimate seismic hazards on a global scale. Temblor.net uses the Global Earth Activity Rate (GEAR) model to provide estimates of seismic hazard at a global to local scale (Bird et al., 2015). GEAR blends quakes during the past 41 years with strain of the Earth’s crust as measured using Global Positioning System (GPS) observations.

Below is a map prepared using the temblor.net app. Seismicity from the past month, week, and day are shown as colored circles. The temblor app suggests that this region of San Bernardino, CA has an earthquake score of 93. To find out what your earthquake score is, enter your address in the app at temblor.net.

Earthquake Risk map for southern California, centered on the inland empire. Active faults are shown as red lines. Earthquakes from the past month are shown as circles.

We Imagine the Consequences

Earthquakes can cause damage to buildings and other infrastructure due to the shaking intensity. The closer to the earthquake, the higher the intensity. Buildings are located on different types of bedrock and this can amplify the shaking intensity in places. How do we know this? We have made direct observations of the damage from earthquakes.

There is ample evidence of what happens during earthquakes like what will occur on the SSAF someday. The same fault system, further north, has also ruptured in historic time. In 1868, the Hayward fault (a sister fault of the San Andreas) had an earthquake that caused extensive damage in the San Francisco Bay area. The USGS and the California Geological Survey are using the 150 year anniversary of this earthquake as a tool to educate the public about earthquake hazards along these active faults in northern California. Here is a short video about the HayWired Scenario. More can be learned about how to outsmart disaster at the “HayWired” website here.

Below is a photo from the aftermath of the 1868 Hayward fault earthquake.

This photo shows damage to “Pierce’s House,” a building damaged by the 1868 Hayward fault earthquake. Image source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Another historic earthquake that caused extensive damage in California is the 1906 Great San Francisco earthquake, another San Andreas fault earthquake. The damage from this earthquake included building damage and fire. Fire is one of the most common damaging effects of an earthquake like what will happen someday on the SSAF.

Below is a photo showing damage to houses that were built on material that did not perform well during an earthquake.

Photo of houses following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Photo from National Archives Record Group 46, public domain.

The combination of hazard and exposure (people) is what we call risk. When people are exposed to earthquake hazards, they are at risk from damage due to those earthquakes. If there is an earthquake and nobody is there to experience the earthquake, there is no risk. One major difference between 1868, 1906, and today is that there are more people that live close to these earthquake faults. While the average number of earthquakes stays relatively constant through time, as the population grows in earthquake country, the risk also grows.

Do you live along the San Andreas or some other plate boundary fault? What about another kind of fault?

To learn more about your exposure to these hazards, visit temblor.net.

When is the next Big One?

We don’t know when the next southern San Andreas fault big earthquake will happen. Currently there are no scientifically demonstrated ways to predict earthquakes. We can use the frequency of past earthquakes and patterns of earthquake occurrence (current seismicity) to estimate the chance that an earthquake will occur over a period of time.

These estimates of future earthquake occurrence are called forecasts. Most people are familiar with weather forecasts, but we know much less about earthquakes than we do about weather. Because of this, earthquake forecasts may not have the same amount of accuracy that weather forecasts do. However, these forecasts are based on the latest cutting edge science about earthquakes and are monumentally better than simply tossing a coin. The cool thing about these forecasts is that the science behind them improves over time as we learn more about how earthquakes happen. This is another improvement over coin tosses, which flip pretty much the same as they did since coins were invented.

The Whistle is an upcoming series of broadcasts produced by the Empire Network, a collaboration between KVCR, PBS, and National Public Radio.

This four-part documentary series that dives into earthquake science, history, local and international earthquakes and tsunamis, California preparedness and immediate response, prevention, mitigation, retrofits, resilience, sustainability, conservation, incentives, challenges, new technologies… and solutions. Are we ready for the Big One?

The first episode airs on October 25 and we will learn about earthquakes and the San Andreas fault:

______________________________________________________
Earthquakes and the San Andreas fault. The Ring of Fire. What do we know about earthquakes today? What causes them, how often, why we know the Big One is due. Evolution of seismology and our understanding of earthquakes and plate tectonics. How did the First Nations and early European settlers deal with Earthquakes before modern technology? How dangerous is the threat and how much of an impact can a big earthquake cause? What will happen when the next big one hits?
______________________________________________________

Episode 2 covers how our immediate response might unfold during and following the Big One. Episode 3 reviews our knowledge of the current state of infrastructures (buildings, roads) and how an earthquake might impact these investments in society. Finally, the 4th episode presents an evaluation of how we have improved our ability to be resilient in the face of disasters from the Big One following decades of applying the scientific method to our observations of earthquakes. How will Earthquake Early Warning work and how will we benefit from this? Learn more by watching The Whistle.

The premiere for “The Whistle, Are We Ready for the Big One?” premieres on Thursday Oct. 25. Watch the first episode on television, or head to this website where the video will be available to stream online.

References

Bird, P., Jackson, D. D., Kagan, Y. Y., Kreemer, C., and Stein, R. S., 2015. GEAR1: A global earthquake activity rate model constructed from geodetic strain rates and smoothed seismicity, Bull. Seismol. Soc. Am., v. 105, no. 5, p. 2538–2554, DOI: 10.1785/0120150058

Sharer, K.M., Weldon, R.J.III., Fumal, T.E., and Biasi, G., 2007. Paleoearthquakes on the Southern San Andreas Fault, Wrightwood, California, 3000 to 1500 B.C.: A New Method for Evaluating Paleoseismic Evidence and Earthquake Horizons in Bull. Seismol. Soc. Am., v. 97, no. 4, p. 1054–1093, DOI: 10.1785/0120060137

Weldon, R., Sharer, K.M., Fumal, T., and Biasi, G., 2004. Wrightwood and the Earthquake Cycle: What a Long Recurrence Record Tells Us About How Faults Work in GSA Today, v. 14, no. 9, doi: 10.1130/1052-5173(2004)0142.0.CO;2

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

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

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From temblor: “Greek earthquake in a region of high seismic hazard”

From temblor

October 26, 2018
Jason R. Patton, Ph.D.
Ross Stein, Ph.D.
Volkan Sevilgen, M.Sc.

An earthquake with a magnitude of M = 6.8 earthquake struck today along the coast of Greece, preceded by a M = 5.0 earthquake. This large earthquake was felt widely across the region, including Italy, Albania, Bulgaria, and Macedonia. . Greece is at the intersection of several different tectonic regimes and is spanned by a zone of increased seismic hazard evidenced by the GEAR seismic hazard model. The earthquake is related to the convergent plate boundary that spans the southern boundary of Greece. The Gulf of Corinth, where the strongest shaking was felt, is the most seismically active site in Greece.

Tectonic Setting

Greece is in the middle of a tectonic die, with the right-lateral strike-slip North Anatolia fault striking from the east and the Ionian trench subduction zone converging from the south. In addition, there is a rapid (10-15 mm per year) extension at the Corinth Rift, forming the Gulf of Corinth just northeast of today’s earthquake sequence.

The interaction of these different plate boundaries results in overlapping fault systems of different types of faults. The southern boundary of Greece is characterized by the formation of thrust faults formed from compression due to the subduction of the Africa plate beneath the Anatolia plate.

The North Anatolia fault is a high slip rate fault (it moves fast) and can generate large damaging earthquakes such as the 1999 M = 7.6 Izmit earthquake. Much of the North Anatolia fault has ruptured in the 20th century and many consider the segment of the fault that runs near Istanbul, Turkey, is thought to be ready to slip next.

The map below shows how the North Anatolia fault enters the region and how the subduction zones may be offset by the Kefallonia fault (Kokkalas, et al., 2006). The Ionian trench is labeled “Hellenic Arc” in this map. The M = 6.8 earthquake is in the general location of the blue star.

Plate boundary faults are shown with symbols representing the type of plate boundary. Subduction zones are shown with triangles pointing in the direction of motion of the down-going plate. Strike-slip relative motion is shown as oppositely directed arrows. Thick black arrows show relative plate motion in mm per year. Thin arrows with black dots at their base are Global Positioning System plate velocities (reference vector scale is in lower right corner).

Seismic Hazards

Hundreds of millions of people globally live in earthquake country. Do you live along a subduction zone or other plate boundary fault? What about another kind of fault?

To learn more about your exposure to these hazards, visit temblor.net.

Several governments and non-governmental organizations prepare estimates of seismic hazard so that people can ensure their building codes are designed to mitigate these hazards. The Global Earthquake Model (GEM) is an example of our efforts to estimate seismic hazards on a global scale. Temblor.net uses the Global Earth Activity Rate (GEAR) model to provide estimates of seismic hazard at a global to local scale (Bird et al., 2015). GEAR blends quakes during the past 41 years with strain of the Earth’s crust as measured using Global Positioning System (GPS) observations.

Below is a map prepared using the temblor.net app. Seismicity from the past month, week, and day are shown as colored circles. The rainbow color scale represents the chance of a given earthquake magnitude, for a given location, within the lifetime of a person (technically, it is the magnitude with a 1% chance per year of occurring within 100 km). The temblor app suggests that this region could have an earthquake with a magnitude of M = 7.0 to 7.25 in a typical lifetime, and so the M = 6.8 was by no means rare or unexpected.

Note how the seismic hazard is increased along the North Anatolia fault in Turkey and follows this fault as it enters Greece. There is also an increased risk of earthquakes associated with the Ionian trench. This belt of increased seismic hazard is well correlated with the tectonic boundaries. Much of Greece lies within this zone of increased seismic hazard.

Global Earthquake Activity Rate map for this region of the western equatorial Pacific. Faults are shown as red lines. Warmer colors represent regions that are more likely to experience a larger earthquake than the regions with cooler colors. Seismicity from the past is shown and the location of the M 6.8 earthquake is located near the blue teardrop symbol.

References

Bird, P., Jackson, D. D., Kagan, Y. Y., Kreemer, C., and Stein, R. S., 2015. GEAR1: A global earthquake activity rate model constructed from geodetic strain rates and smoothed seismicity, Bull. Seismol. Soc. Am., v. 105, no. 5, p. 2538–2554, DOI: 10.1785/0120150058

Kokkalas, S., Xypolias, P., Koukouvelas, I., and Doutsos, T., 2006, Postcollisional contractional and extensional deformation in the Aegean region, in Dilek, Y., and Pavlides, S., eds., Postcollisional tectonics and magmatism in the Mediterranean region and Asia: Geological Society of America Special Paper 409, p. 97–123

More can be found about the seismotectonics of this region here.

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

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

From National Public Radio (NPR): “At Least 384 Killed, Hundreds Injured After Earthquake And Tsunami Hit Indonesia”

From National Public Radio (NPR)

A man surveys damage caused by the earthquakes and tsunami in Palu, central Sulawesi, Indonesia, Saturday. Hundreds of people were killed.
Rifki/AP

Updated at 4:07 a.m. ET Saturday

At least 384 people were killed and at least 540 injured Friday after powerful earthquakes struck along the western coast of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, triggering a tsunami that caused “extensive” damage.

“When the [tsunami] threat arose yesterday, people were still doing their activities on the beach and did not immediately run and they became victims,” Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, spokesman for BNPB, Indonesia’s disaster response agency, told reporters in Jakarta, Reuters reported.

“Many bodies were found along the shoreline because of the tsunami,” he said earlier.

Hundreds of people were on hand for a beach festival, which would have started Friday night.

Nugroho earlier said four hospitals in Palu reported 48 people dead, though also said “many victims” are still unaccounted for, according to the Associated Press.

The wire service said a reporter saw “numerous bodies in a hard-hit city,” which “was strewn with debris from collapsed buildings.”

Nugroho told reporters the damage was “extensive,” with thousands of buildings destroyed.

Damaged roads and power and communication outages were reportedly hindering rescue efforts.

A house in Donggala on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi sits damaged after an earthquake early Friday.
Disaster Management Agency /AP

The U.S. Geological Survey said a 7.5 magnitude quake just 6 miles deep hit a sparsely populated area in the early evening. The epicenter was about 50 miles north of Palu.

The strong quake followed a milder 6.1 magnitude temblor hours earlier in the same area.

More than a dozen other earthquakes with a magnitude of at least 5.0 hit the same area of Sulawesi over the course of several hours, the USGS said.

Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency initially announced that the largest quake was “not capable of generating a tsunami affecting the Indian Ocean region.” However, agency chief Dwikorita Karnawati later told Reuters that a tsunami had struck Palu, located on the Makassar Strait, which connects the Celebes and Java seas.

“The 1.5- to 2-meter [6 1/2-foot] tsunami has receded,” Karnawati told the news service. “The situation is chaotic, people are running on the streets and buildings collapsed. There is a ship washed ashore.”

An official of the Central Sulawesi Museum in Palu told The Jakarta Post, “Yes, there was a smashing of seawater.” Then, the newspaper reported, the phone connection “broke down.”

Nugroho said the city of Donggala was also hit by the tsunami, the AP reported.

“The cut to telecommunications and darkness are hampering efforts to obtain information,” he said, according to the AP. “All national potential will be deployed, and tomorrow morning we will deploy Hercules and helicopters to provide assistance in tsunami-affected areas.”

The devastating South Asian tsunami in 2004 brought waves that witnesses in Aceh Province, Indonesia, said were 50 to 70 feet tall, NPR reported.

As NPR’s Mark Memmott has noted, “an estimated 230,000 people died after an earthquake triggered a massive tsunami that devastated South Asian coasts from Indonesia to Thailand, Sri Lanka and India.”

In August, more than 500 were killed in an earthquake that struck Indonesia’s Lombok island.

See the full article here.

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

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

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

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We are NPR. And this is our story.

From Stanford University: “After the Big One: Understanding aftershock risk”

From Stanford University

Cranes dismantle buildings damaged by the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. (Photo credit: iStock)

September 21, 2018
Josie Garthwaite

Geophysicist Gregory Beroza discusses the culprits behind destructive aftershocks and why scientists are harnessing artificial intelligence to gain new insights into earthquake risks.

In early September 2018, a powerful earthquake on the island of Hokkaido in northern Japan triggered landslides, toppled buildings, cut power, halted industry, killed more than 40 people and injured hundreds. The national meteorological agency warned that aftershocks could strike for up to a week following the main event.

“A large earthquake will typically have thousands of aftershocks,” said Gregory Beroza, the Wayne Loel Professor of geophysics in the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth) at Stanford University. “We know that a big earthquake changes something in Earth’s crust that causes these aftershocks to happen.”

The rarity of big quakes, however, makes it difficult to document and statistically model how large earthquakes interact with each other in space and time. Aftershocks could offer a workaround. “Aftershocks occur by the same mechanism, on the same geological faults and under the same conditions as other earthquakes,” Beroza explained in a recent article in the journal Nature. As a result, interactions between the largest earthquake in a sequence, known as a mainshock, and its aftershocks may hold clues to earthquake interactions more broadly, helping to explain how changes on a fault induced by one earthquake may affect the potential site of another.

Here, Beroza discusses how scientists forecast aftershocks and why they’re turning to artificial intelligence to build better models for the future.

What are the current methods for predicting foreshocks and where do they fall short?

GREGORY BEROZA: When a large earthquake slips, that changes the forces throughout the Earth’s crust nearby. It’s thought that this stress change is most responsible for triggering aftershocks. The stress is what drives earthquakes.

Scientists have noted a tendency for aftershocks to occur where two types of stress act on a fault change. The first type is called is normal stress, which is how strongly two sides of a fault are pushing together or pulling apart. The second type is called shear stress, or how strongly the two sides are being pushed past one another, parallel to the fault, by remote forces. Decreases in the normal stress and increases in the shear stress are expected to encourage subsequent earthquakes. Measures of these changes in the volume of rock around a fault are combined into a single metric called the Coulomb failure stress change.

But it’s not a hard and fast rule. Some earthquakes occur where in a sense they shouldn’t, by that metric. There are components of stress that are different from shear stress and normal stress. There’s stress in other directions, and complex combinations. So we do okay at predicting where aftershocks will, and will not, occur after a mainshock, but not as well as we’d like.

This aerial view shows damaged houses in Mashiki town, Kumamoto prefecture, southern Japan, Friday, April 15, 2016, a day after a magnitude-6.5 earthquake. More than 100 aftershocks from Thursday night’s magnitude-6.5 earthquake continued to rattle the region as businesses and residents got a fuller look at the widespread damage from the unusually strong quake, which also injured about 800 people. (Koji Harada/Kyodo News via AP) JAPAN OUT, MANDATORY CREDIT

What is an artificial neural network and how can scientists use this kind of artificial intelligence to predict earthquakes and aftershocks?

BEROZA: Picture a machine that takes inputs from the left. Moving to the right you have a series of layers, each containing a bunch of connected neurons. And at the other end you have an outcome of some kind.

One neuron can excite another. When you add lots of these layers with lots of different interactions, you very rapidly get an extremely large set of possible relationships. When people talk about “deep” neural networks, that means they have a lot of layers.

In this case, your input is information about stress on a fault. The output is information about the locations of aftershocks. Scientists can take examples of observed earthquakes and use that data to train the neurons to interact in ways that produce an outcome that was observed in the real world. It’s a process called machine learning. Given this set of inputs, what’s the right answer? What did the Earth tell us for this earthquake?

A pioneering effort to use artificial intelligence in this context published in Nature in August 2018. The authors fed a machine-learning algorithm estimates of stress changes and information on where aftershocks did or didn’t occur for a whole bunch of earthquakes. They’re not doing earthquake prediction in the usual sense, where you try to predict the time, place and magnitude of the earthquake. They’re just looking for where aftershocks occur. The model doesn’t capture the true complexity of the Earth, but it’s moving in the right direction.

How might artificial intelligence approaches be applied to seismology more broadly?

BEROZA: In the Earth sciences in general, we have complicated geological systems that interact strongly in ways we don’t understand. Machine learning and artificial intelligence can help us explore and maybe uncover the nature of some of those complicated relationships. It can help us explore and find relationships that scientists hadn’t thought of or tested.

We also have very large data sets. The biggest seismic network I’ve worked with has something like 5,000 sensors in it. That’s 5,000 sensors, 100 samples per second, and it runs continuously for months. There’s so much data it’s hard to even look at it.

The trend is for these data sets to be ever larger. Within a few years, we’re going to be working with data sets of over 10,000 sensors. How do you make sure you’re getting as much information as you can out of those massive data sets?

Our usual way of doing business isn’t going to scale at some point. Techniques such as data mining and machine learning to help us extract as much information as we can from these very large data sets are going to be an essential part of understanding our planet in the future.

Gregory Beroza co-directs the Stanford Center for Induced and Triggered Seismicity (SCITS).

See the full article here .

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

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings
Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Stanford University campus. No image credit

Leland and Jane Stanford founded the University to “promote the public welfare by exercising an influence on behalf of humanity and civilization.” Stanford opened its doors in 1891, and more than a century later, it remains dedicated to finding solutions to the great challenges of the day and to preparing our students for leadership in today’s complex world. Stanford, is an American private research university located in Stanford, California on an 8,180-acre (3,310 ha) campus near Palo Alto. Since 1952, more than 54 Stanford faculty, staff, and alumni have won the Nobel Prize, including 19 current faculty members

From temblor: “A tectonic squeeze may be loading three thrust faults beneath central Los Angeles”

From temblor

September 17, 2018
Chris Rollins

Thrust-faulting earthquakes are a fact of life in Los Angeles and a threat to it. Three such earthquakes in the second half of the 20th century painfully etched this ongoing threat to life, limb and infrastructure into the memories and the backs of the minds of many who call this growing metropolis home. The first struck 40 seconds after 6:00 AM on a February morning in 1971 when a section of a thrust fault beneath the western San Gabriel Mountains ruptured in a magnitude 6.7 tremor. The earthquake killed 60 people, including 49 in the catastrophic collapse of the Veterans Administration Hospital in Sylmar, the closest town to the event (which is often referred to as the Sylmar earthquake). Among other structures hit hard were the newly built Newhall Pass interchange at the junction of Interstate 5 and California State Route 14, of which multiple sections collapsed, and the Van Norman Dam, which narrowly avoided failure in what could have been a cruel deja vu for a city that had been through deadly dam disasters in 1928 and 1963.

Devastation at the Veterans Administration Hospital in the 1971 Sylmar earthquake. Photo courtesy of Los Angeles Times.

Sixteen years later, a section of the Puente Hills thrust fault ruptured in the magnitude 5.9 Whittier Narrows earthquake, killing eight people in East Los Angeles and bringing attention to a class of thrust faults that do not break the surface, called “blind” thrust faults, which will go on to form a key part of this story. Then early on another winter morning in 1994, an even more deeply buried blind thrust fault ruptured beneath the San Fernando Valley in the magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake, causing tens of billions of dollars in damage and taking 57 lives. One of the fatalities was Los Angeles police officer Clarence Wayne Dean, who died on his motorcycle when a span of the Newhall Pass interchange that had been rebuilt following the 1971 Sylmar earthquake collapsed again as he was riding across it in the predawn darkness.

Collapse of the Newhall Pass (I-5/CA-14) interchange in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Officer Dean died on the downed section of overpass at right. The interchange has since been renamed the Clarence Wayne Dean Memorial Interchange in his memory. Photo courtesy of CNN.

LA’s problem: The squeeze

Thrust earthquakes like these, in which the top side of the fault is thrust up and over the bottom side, will likely strike Los Angeles again in the 21st century. They may in fact pose a greater hazard to the city than earthquakes on the nearby San Andreas Fault because they can occur directly beneath the central metropolitan area. This means that a city that has found so much of its identity and place in history from being improvised as it went, and from being a cultural and economic melting pot, now faces the unwieldy task of readying its diverse infrastructure and populace for the strong shaking these kinds of earthquakes can produce.

One way that the earthquake science community has been assessing the seismic hazard in LA is by using geodesy – long-term, high-precision monitoring of the deformation of the Earth’s surface – to locate sections of faults that are stuck, or locked, causing the Earth’s crust to deform around them. It is this bending of the crust, or accumulated strain, that is violently released in earthquakes; therefore the locations where this bending is taking place might indicate where future earthquakes will occur, and perhaps how large and frequent they could be. Several decades of geodetic monitoring have shown that the greater Los Angeles area is being squeezed from north to south at roughly 8-9 millimeters per year (⅓ inch per year), about one-fourth the rate at which human fingernails grow. Thrust faults, such as those on which the Sylmar, Whittier Narrows and Northridge earthquakes struck, are ultimately driven by this compression.

Geodetic data, tectonics and material properties relevant to the problem. Dark blue arrows show the north-south tectonic compression inferred by Argus et al. [2005] after removing deformation caused by aquifer and oil use. Black lines are faults, dashed where blind. Background shading is a measure of material stiffness at the surface based on the Community Velocity Model [Shaw et al., 2015]. “Beach balls” show the locations and senses of slip of the 1971 Sylmar, 1987 Whittier Narrows and 1994 Northridge earthquakes. Figure simplified from Rollins et al. [2018].

Why the science is still very much ongoing

The task of linking the north-south tectonic squeeze to specific faults encounters several unique challenges in Los Angeles. First, the city sits atop not only active faults but also several aquifers and oil fields that have long provided part of its livelihood and continue to be used today, which deforms the crust around them. Geodetic data are affected by this anthropogenic deformation, to the extent that a recent study used these data to observe Los Angeles “breathing” water from year to year and even to resolve key hydrological properties of particular sections of aquifers. This spectacular deformation, which furnishes science that can be used in resource management around the world, has the unfortunate effect of obscuring the more gradual north-south tectonic shortening in Los Angeles in these data.

Animation from Riel et al. [2018] showing long-term subsidence of the Earth’s surface due to use of the Los Angeles and Santa Ana aquifers.

Second, the faults are a complex jumble. The crust underlying Los Angeles is cut by thrust faults, strike-slip faults like the San Andreas Fault and subparallel to it, and other strike-slip faults nearly perpendicular to it. Although these faults all take part in accommodating the gradual north-south squeeze, the relative contributions of the thrust and strike-slip faults in doing so has been the subject of debate. The problem of estimating strain accumulation on subsurface faults is also generally at the mercy of uncertainties as to how faults behave at depth in the Earth’s crust and how they intersect and link up.

Third, Los Angeles sits atop a deep sedimentary basin, created when a previous episode of extension created a “hole” in the crust that was gradually filled by sediments eroded off the surrounding mountain ranges. These sedimentary layers are more easily deformed than the stiffer rocks in the mountains around the basin, complicating the problem of estimating strain accumulation at depth from the way the surface is deforming. Finally, as in the case of the Puente Hills Fault, some of the major thrust faults in Los Angeles do not break the surface but are “blind.” This means that the bending of the crust around locked sections of these faults is buried and more difficult to detect at the surface.

Basin sediments affect the relationship between fault slip and deformation at the surface by up to 50% for the cases of the Puente Hills Fault (left) and Compton Fault (right). For the same fault slip, the basin is more compliant and so the Earth’s surface is displaced more (red arrows) than if it were absent (blue arrows). Figure simplified from Rollins et al. [2018].

Three thrust faults may be doing a lot of the work

Several important advances over the past two decades have paved pathways towards overcoming these challenges. The signal of deformation due to water and oil management can be subtracted from the geodetic data to yield a clearer picture of the tectonic shortening. The geometries of faults at depth have also come into focus, as earth scientists at the Southern California Earthquake Center and Harvard University have compiled decades of oil well logs and seismic reflection data to build the Community Fault Model, a detailed 3D picture of these complex geometries. A parallel effort has yielded the Community Velocity Model, a 3D model of the structure and composition of the Southern California crust that is internally consistent with the fault geometries.

A cross section of faults and earthquakes across central Los Angeles from Rollins et al. [2018]. Red lines are faults, dashed where uncertain; pairs of arrows along the thrust faults show their long-term sense of slip. White circles are earthquakes. Basin structure is from the Community Velocity Model.

Recently, a team of researchers from Caltech, JPL and USC (with contributions from many other earthquake scientists) has begun to put these pieces together. Their approaches and findings were published in the Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR) this summer. On the challenge presented by the complex array of faults, the study found that the strike-slip faults probably accommodate less than 20% of the total shortening at the max, leaving the rest to be explained by thrust faulting or other processes. Three thrust faults, the Sierra Madre, Puente Hills and Compton faults, stand out in particular as good candidates. All three appear to span the Los Angeles basin from west to east, and the Puente Hills and Sierra Madre faults have generated moderate earthquakes in the last three decades, including the Whittier Narrows shock and a magnitude 5.8 tremor in 1991. Paleoseismology (the study of prehistoric earthquakes) has also revealed that these three faults have each generated multiple earthquakes in the past 15,000 years whose magnitudes may have exceeded 7.0.

Alternative models of how quickly strain is accumulating on the Compton, Puente Hills and Sierra Madre Faults, assuming that the transition between completely locked (stuck) and freely slipping patches of fault is gradual (left) or sharp (right), simplified from Rollins et al. [2018]. Gray lines are major highways.

How fast is stress building up on these faults?

Exploring a wide range of assumptions (such as whether the transitions between stuck and unstuck sections of faults may be gradual or abrupt), the team inferred that the Sierra Madre, Puente Hills and Compton faults appear to be partially or fully locked and building up stress on their upper (shallowest) sections. The estimated total rate of strain accumulation on the three faults is equivalent to a magnitude 6.7-6.8 earthquake like the Sylmar earthquake once every 100 years, or a magnitude 7.0 shock every 250 years. These back-of-the-envelope calculations, however, belie the fact that this strain is likely released by earthquakes across a wide range of magnitudes. The team is currently working to assess just how wide this range of magnitudes practically needs to be: whether the strain can be released as fast as it is accruing without needing to invoke earthquakes larger than Sylmar and Northridge, for example, or whether the M>7 thrust earthquakes inferred from paleoseismology are indeed a likely part of the picture over the long term.

This picture of strain accumulation will sharpen as the methods used to build it are improved, as community models of faults and structure continue to be refined, and especially as more high-resolution data, such as that used to observe LA “breathing” water, is brought to bear on the estimation problem. The tolls of the Sylmar, Whittier Narrows and Northridge earthquakes in lives and livelihoods are a reminder that we should work as fast as possible to understand the menace that lies beneath the City of Angels.

References

Argus, D. F., Heflin, M. B., Peltzer, G., Crampé, F., & Webb, F. H. (2005). Interseismic strain accumulation and anthropogenic motion in metropolitan Los Angeles. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth 110(B4).

Riel, B. V., Simons, M., Ponti, D., Agram, P., & Jolivet, R. (2018). Quantifying ground deformation in the Los Angeles and Santa Ana coastal basins due to groundwater withdrawal. Water Resources Research 54(5), 3557-3582.

Rollins, C., Avouac, J.-P., Landry, W., Argus, D. F., & Barbot, S. D. (2018). Interseismic strain accumulation on faults beneath Los Angeles, California. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth 123, doi: 10.1029/2017JB015387.

Shaw, J. H., Plesch, A., Tape, C., Suess, M. P., Jordan, T. H., Ely, G., Hauksson, E., Tromp, J., Tanimoto, T., & Graves, R. (2015). Unified structural representation of the southern California crust and upper mantle. Earth and Planetary Science Letters 415: 1-15.

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

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

From Horizon The EU Research and Innovation Magazine : “Plate tectonics observatory to create seismic shift in earthquake research”

From Horizon The EU Research and Innovation Magazine

13 September 2018
Gareth Willmer

A 6.2-magnitude earthquake in Amatrice, Italy, in August 2016 killed nearly 300 people. Image credit – Amatrice Corso by Mario1952 is licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-2.5 and 2016 Amatrice earthquake by Leggi il Firenzepost is licensed under CC BY 3.0

We may never be able to entirely predict earthquakes such as those that hit central Italy in 2016, but we could better assess how they’re going to play out by joining up data from different scientific fields in a new Europe-wide observatory, say scientists.

In 2016 and early 2017, a series of major earthquakes rocked central Italy. In the hill town of Amatrice, one magnitude-6.2 earthquake devastated the town and claimed the lives of nearly 300 people, with hundreds more injured.

Richard Walters, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at Durham University, UK, has been studying a variety of datasets to understand how these quakes played out.

From Durham University

He and his colleagues found that a network of underground faults meant there was a series of seismic events rather than one major earthquake – a finding that could help scientists predict how future seismic events unroll.

‘We were only able to achieve this by analysing a huge variety of datasets,’ said Dr Walters. These included catalogues of thousands of tiny aftershocks, maps of earthquake ruptures measured by geologists clambering over Italian hillslopes, GPS-based ground-motion measurements, data collected by a satellite hundreds of kilometres up, and seismological data from a global network of instruments.

‘Many of these datasets or processed products were generously shared by other scientists for free, and were fundamental to our results,’ he said. ‘This is how we make big advances.’

At the moment, this type of research can rely on having a strong network of contacts and disadvantage those without them. That’s where a new initiative called the European Plate Observing System (EPOS), set to launch in 2020, comes in.

The aim is to create an online tool that brings together data products and knowledge into a central hub across the solid Earth science disciplines.

‘The idea is that a scientist can go to the EPOS portal, where they can find a repository with all the earthquake rupture models, historical earthquake data and strain maps, and use this data to make an interpretative model,’ said Professor Massimo Cocco, the project’s coordinator.

‘A scientist studying an earthquake, a volcano, a tsunami, and so on, needs to be able to access very different data generated by different communities.’

__________________________________________________

‘While in Europe’s current climate politicians may be putting up borders, scientists in those same countries are trying even harder to break down national barriers.’

Dr Richard Walters, Durham University, UK
__________________________________________________

Mosaic

At the moment, findings on solid Earth science at a European scale are scattered among a mosaic of hundreds of research organisations. The challenge is to incorporate a variety of accessible information from many different scientific fields, using a combination of real-time, historical and interpretative data.

EPOS will integrate data from 10 areas of Earth science, including seismology, geodesy, geological data, volcano observations, satellite data products and anthropogenic – or human-influenced – hazards.

It will help build on the type of data integration that happened after the Amatrice quake, in which the lead organisation behind EPOS – Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) – was involved in coordinating and fostering data sharing.

This included real-time data from temporary sensor deployments, as well as seismic hazard maps, satellite data products and geophysical data – leading to a first model of the quake’s causative source within 48 hours to aid emergency planning.

So far, a prototype of the portal has been developed and it will now be tested by users over the coming year to make sure it meets needs.

Dr Walters said that EPOS is right on time. ‘Projects like EPOS are especially timely and valuable right now, as many of the subdisciplines that make up solid Earth geoscience are entering the era of big data,’ he said.

Eyjafjallajökull

The eruption of Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull in 2010 highlights another issue that EPOS is hoping to improve – the challenge of coordination across borders. Though this event did not cost human lives, it had a much wider impact in Europe, leading to flights being grounded throughout the region and costing airlines an estimated €1.3 billion.

In such cases, said Prof. Cocco, it helps to know factors such as the ash’s composition, something that affects how a plume travels but is not necessarily included in the models of meteorologists. That knowledge could be gained through access to volcanology data, and also used by aviation authorities and airlines, potentially to design systems to protect engines.

Prof. Cocco said the idea is that EPOS could also be used by people outside the research community to ‘increase the resilience of society to geohazards’. An engineer or organisation could use data on ground shaking or earthquake occurrence to aid safe exploitation of resources or evaluate risks in building a nuclear power plant, for example.

In addition, the aim is to make it easier for students or young scientists to interpret data through tools, software, tutorials and discovery services, rather than having access to just raw data. ‘Otherwise, you are providing only usability to skilled scientists,’ said Prof. Cocco. ‘This, to me, is the only way to achieve open science.’

At present, the EPOS community comprises about 50 partners across 25 European countries, with hundreds of research infrastructures, institutes and organisations providing data. The organisation has, meanwhile, submitted a final application to become a legal entity known as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), with a decision establishing the ERIC expected within the next two months. This official status will aid integration with other national and European organisations, and have benefits in the allocation of funding, said Prof. Cocco.

Professor Giulio Di Toro, a structural geologist at the University of Padova in Italy, said it is great to have this type of hub to bring information together and improve access, but also important to ensure that it doesn’t lead to an increase in bureaucracy. If institutions come up against funding issues, it could also pose a challenge to their ability to share data, he added: ‘If for some years you don’t get grants, you will not produce data to share.’

Meanwhile, Dr Walters sees a positive spirit reflected in these types of initiative. ‘While in Europe’s current climate politicians may be putting up borders,’ he said, ‘scientists in those same countries are trying even harder to break down national barriers, and working together to build something better for everyone.’

The implementation phase of EPOS is being part-funded by the EU. If you liked this article, please consider sharing it on social media.

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

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 Eos: “Earthquake Precursors, Processes, and Predictions “

From AGU

From Eos

8.31.18
Dimitar Ouzounov

A new book presents various studies that may establish a link between earthquakes and different types of precursor signals from the Earth, atmosphere and space.

The village of Onna was severely damaged in the 2009 earthquake that struck the Abruzzo region of Italy. Our goal is to find robust earthquake precursors that may be able to predict some of the most damaging events, like Onna. The proposed earthquake precursor signals described in our book could contribute to reliable forecasting of future seismic events; however, additional study and testing is needed. Credit: Angelo_Giordano / 170 images (CC0)

Scientists know much more about what happens after an earthquake (e.g. fault geometry, slip rates, ground deformation) than the various and complex phenomena accompanying the preparatory phases before a seismic event. Pre-Earthquake Processes: A Multi-disciplinary Approach to Earthquake Prediction Studies, a new book just published by the American Geophysical Union, explores different signals that have been recorded prior to some earthquakes and the extent to which they might be used for forecasting or prediction.

The reporting of physical phenomena observed before large earthquakes has a long history, with fogs, clouds, and animal behavior recorded since the days of Aristotle in Ancient Greece, Pliny in Ancient Rome, and multiple scholars in ancient China [Martinelli, 2018]. Many more recent case studies have suggested geophysical and geochemical “anomalies” occurring before earthquakes [Tributsch, 1978; Cicerone et al., 2009 Nature].

It should not be surprising that a large accumulation of stress in the Earth’s crust would produce precursory signals. Some of these precursors have been correlated with a range of anomalous phenomena recorded both in the ground and in the atmosphere. These have been measured by variations in radon, the electromagnetic field, thermal infrared radiation, outgoing longwave radiation, and the total electron content of the ionosphere.

Earth observations from sensors both in space and on the ground present new possibilities for investigating the build-up of stress within the Earth’s crust prior to earthquakes and monitoring a broad range of abnormal phenomena that may be connected. This could enable us to improve our understanding of the lead up to earthquakes at global scales by observing possible lithosphere-atmosphere coupling.

For example, the French Detection of Electro-Magnetic Emissions Transmitted from Earthquake Regions (DEMETER) satellite mission (2004-2010) was the first to systematically study electro-magnetic signals in relation to earthquakes and volcanoes. Earlier in 2018, the China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite (CSES-1) was launched, dedicated to monitoring electromagnetic fields and particles. There is also a global initiative to develop and coordinate test sites for observation and validation of pre-earthquake signals located in Japan, Taiwan, Italy, Greece, China, Russia, and the United States of America.

We have carried out statistical checks of historic data to study the correlations between precursor signals and major earthquake events. For example, a decadal study of statistical data for Japan and Taiwan suggested a significant increase in the probability of electromagnetic, thermal infrared, outgoing longwave radiation, and total electron content measurements before large earthquakes [Hattori and Han, 2018; Liu et al., 2018]. A study of satellite data from DEMETER for more than 9000 earthquakes indicated a decrease of the intensity of electromagnetic radiation prior to earthquakes with a magnitude greater than five [Píša et al. 2013, Parrot and Li, 2018]. These results suggest that the earthquake detection based on measurements of these variables is better than a random guess and could potentially be of use in forecasting.

Our book also presents testing of the CN earthquake prediction algorithm for seismicity in Italy [Peresan, 2018], the first attempt of combining probabilistic seismicity models with precursory information [Shebalin, 2018], and the testing of short-term alerts based on a multi-parameter approach for major seismic events in Japan, Chile, Nepal and Iran [Ouzounov et al., 2018]. Further testing is needed to better understand false alarm ratios and the overall physics of earthquake preparation.

Conceptual diagram of an integrated satellite and terrestrial framework for multiparameter observations of pre‐earthquake signals in Japan. The ground component includes seismic, electro-magnetic observations, radon, weather, VLF–VHF radio frequencies, and ocean‐bottom electro-magnetic sensors. Satellite component includes GPS/total electron content, synthetic-aperture radar, Swarm, microwave, and thermal infrared satellites. Credit: Katsumi Hattori, presented in Ouzounov et al, 2018, Chapter 20

Based on our international collaborative work, we found that reliable detection of pre-earthquake signals associated with major seismicity (magnitude greater than 6) could be done only by integration of space- and ground-based observations. However, a major challenge for using precursor signals for earthquake prediction is gathering data from a regional or global network of monitoring stations to a central location and conducting an analysis to determine if, based on previous measurements, they indicate an impending earthquake.

We also found that no single existing method for precursor monitoring can provide reliable short-term forecasting on a regional or global scale, probably because of the diversity of geologic regions where seismic activity takes place and the complexity of earthquake processes.

The pre-earthquake phenomena that we observe are intrinsically dynamic but new Earth observations and analytical information systems could enhance our ability to observe and better understand these phenomena.

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.

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

From Discover Magazine: “Venezuela Rocked By Large Earthquake”

From Discover Magazine

August 21, 2018
Erik Klemetti

Map of shaking felt by the M7.3 earthquake in Venezuela on August 21, 2018. USGS.

Venezuela was hit by a M7.3 earthquake today, causing extensive damage across the northern part of the country as well as nearby Trinidad & Tobago. Shaking was felt as far away at Bogotá, Martinique and Guyana, thousands of kilometers from the earthquake’s epicenter. This temblor may have been the largest earthquake to strike Venezuela since a M7.7 hit off of Caracas in 1900.

The depth of the earthquake meant the shaking was felt widely across the region and from the looks of it, there was some sustained shaking but that depth might also mean that massive destruction was avoided. Some reports suggest that only minor to moderate damage was seen in cities relatively close to the epicenter. No injuries have been reported so far, however, news is slow to come out of the country due to its current political crisis.

The region where the earthquake struck is tectonically complicated, with the Lesser Antilles subduction zone just to the east and a strike-slip boundary running across northern South America and the Caribbean Plate. Today’s earthquake was not a strike-slip event like one might expect for the region. Instead, it was a reverse fault where plates are moving towards each other at a depth of ~123 kilometers. This might suggest that the earthquake was rooted in the South American plate’s subduction.

Focal mechanism (as shown by the “beachball” in the map) is unusual and doesn’t seem to indicate simple strike-slip faulting along a transform fault. Maybe the southernmost edge of the South American plate that is subducting under the Lesser Antilles arc might have been involved. pic.twitter.com/6CytpaDJPx

The region where the earthquake struck is tectonically complicated, with the Lesser Antilles subduction zone just to the east and a strike-slip boundary running across northern South America and the Caribbean Plate. Today’s earthquake was not a strike-slip event like one might expect for the region. Instead, it was a reverse fault where plates are moving towards each other at a depth of ~123 kilometers. This might suggest that the earthquake was rooted in the South American plate’s subduction.

August has been a busy month for earthquakes, with 8 M6.5 or greater earthquakes, including a M8.2 that hit Fiji on August 19. That earthquake was centered very deep — about 563 kilometers down (so in the mantle!) — so it did not cause as much shaking felt at the surface as today’s Venezuela earthquake. Before anyone jumps to the conclusion that this cluster of earthquakes means something, Dr. Lucy Jones made it clear that this is just business as usual:

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

From temblor: “M=7.3 earthquake rattles Venezuela and the Caribbean”

From temblor

August 22, 2018
David Jacobson, M.Sc.

Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago sustained damage in yesterday’s M=7.3 earthquake in northeastern Venezuela.

A large earthquake causes damage but no fatalities

Yesterday, at just past 9:30 p.m. local time, a M=7.3 earthquake struck the northeastern coast of Venezuela. Fortunately, this quake occurred in a relatively remote area, and there are no reported deaths as of this morning. However, there is damage from the quake, including in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, nearly 600 km (370 mi) away. Even though only light shaking was recorded in Caracas, according to the USGS ShakeMap, it was great enough to cause the top ten floors of an abandoned skyscraper to shift and lean precariously over the road far below. According to CNN, that area has been evacuated. Closer to the epicenter, in places such as Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, additional structural damage has been observed in buildings.

This Temblor map shows the location of yesterday’s earthquake in northeastern Venezuela. Also visible on the left and right sides of the map respectively are Venezuela’s capital city of Caracas and Trinidad and Tobago’s capital Port of Spain.

A region marked by strike-slip activity

While seismic activity is not uncommon in this region, yesterday’s M=7.3 quake is much deeper, and had different motion than the majority of quakes that impact Venezuela. Northern Venezuela is marked by the boundary between the South American and Caribbean plates. In this location, plate motion is approximately 20 mm/yr, and typically results in right-lateral strike-slip earthquakes at shallow depths. However, yesterday’s earthquake was compressional in nature, and occurred at a depth of 123 km. Therefore, it did not occur on the plate boundary, but rather well beneath it.

Even though much of the seismicity in the region is dominated by the strike-slip plate boundary, the region is also subject to compression and some believe that off the northeastern coast of Venezuela there is an ancient, or not fully-formed subduction zone (Pindell et al., 2015). This zone, which Pindell et al. term the Proto-Caribbean Inversion Zone has the same rough orientation as the strike of yesterday’s earthquake. So, it at least seems possible that the event occurred on this structure, which could pose additional hazards for Venezuela and the southeastern Caribbean.

Regardless of what structure yesterday’s earthquake occurred on, what this event highlights is the seismic hazard of the region. This illustrates both that large earthquakes are possible, and that even weak to light shaking can cause significant damage to buildings not of the highest build quality, as was seen in Caracas. Therefore, it is not only important to know the seismic hazard of where you live, but whether or not your home or office is capable of withstanding shaking.

References
USGS
CNN
Jame L. Pindell, Lorcan Kennan, David Wright & Johan Erikson, Clastic domains of sandstones in central/eastern Venezuela, Trinidad, and Barbados: heavy mineral and tectonic constraints on provenance and palaeogeography, From James, K. H., Lorente, M. A. & Pindell, J. L. (eds) The Origin and Evolution of the Caribbean Plate. Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 328, 743–797

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

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

From Eos: “Bhutan Earthquake Opens Doors to Geophysical Studies”

From AGU

From Eos

13 August 2018
György Hetényi
Rodolphe Cattin
Dowchu Drukpa

Taktsang, also known as the Tiger’s Nest, is a famous cliffside monastery in western Bhutan. Recent geophysical surveys have uncovered evidence of past earthquakes in this region that were much stronger than more recent events. Credit: iStock.com/KiltedArab

In 2015, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake shook the Gorkha District of Nepal, killing more than 9,000. The memory of this event is still vivid for the residents of this central Himalayan nation.

But farther east in the mountains, in Bhutan, many residents doubt the likelihood of a similar event happening to them. Bhutan had experienced several other earthquakes with a magnitude of about 6 during the past century. However, there was no clear evidence that Bhutan had ever seen an earthquake similar to the M7.8 Nepal event.

Findings from recent geophysical exploration suggest that this confidence may be overly optimistic. These results have shown that the eastern Himalayas region is extremely complex compared with the rest of the mountain belt.

The kingdom of Bhutan sets great store in its traditions and its principle of Gross National Happiness. Although its rugged terrain and remote location have allowed this kingdom to preserve its unique culture, these factors have also limited the development of international collaborations there, notably in the Earth sciences. This situation changed in 2009 after a damaging M6.1 earthquake that claimed 11 lives persuaded Bhutan to open its doors to exploration of the region’s geophysics.

Our team studied mountain-building processes in this region after the 2009 earthquake. After 7 years of multipronged field campaigns, we learned that Bhutan’s geodynamics are as unique as its culture. The region’s crustal structure, seismicity, and deformation pattern are all different from what scientists had speculated previously.

During our campaigns, we found evidence that at least one M8 earthquake had, in fact, occurred in Bhutan. This means that other earthquakes of this magnitude could occur in the region again [Hetényi et al., 2016b; Berthet et al., 2014; Le Roux-Mallouf et al., 2016].

A Different Plate?

Although the western and central Himalayan arc curves gently from Pakistan to Sikkim and has a low-lying foreland, the eastern third curves more sharply and has significant topographical relief south of the mountain belt, namely, the Shillong Plateau and neighboring hills (Figure 1). Previous studies proposed that these structures accommodate part of the India-Eurasia tectonic plate convergence. These earlier studies also proposed that the great 1897 Assam earthquake (M8.1) had relieved some of the strain between these converging tectonic plates, thereby lowering earthquake hazard in Bhutan.

Fig. 1. Topographic map of the 2,500-kilometer-long Himalayan arc and surrounding region, with formerly (yellow) and newly (pink) cataloged seismicity. The dextral fault zone (white arrows) between Sikkim and the Shillong Plateau marks the break of the India plate, east of which a zone of complex 3-D deformation begins. Red dates mark the three largest earthquakes mentioned in the text. Green lines mark the surface trace of the megathrust along which the India plate underthrusts the Himalayan orogen, as well as the thrust faults bounding the Shillong Plateau. Political boundaries are shown for reference. Abbreviations: Pl. = plateau; Pr. = Pradesh; Sik. = Sikkim.

We collected new gravity, geodetic, and seismology data, and we found that the lithosphere—the rigid top layer of Earth—beneath Bhutan and the Shillong Plateau is most likely not part of the Indian plate or, if it once was, that it is now detached from it. The demarcation between plates stretches in a NW–SE direction, without a surface trace, but it is evident in a middle to lower crustal zone of continuously active seismicity and dextral (right-lateral) motion [Diehl et al., 2017]. This fault zone most likely hosted an M7 earthquake in 1930.

Research team member Théo Berthet monitors data collection during a campaign to a less visited region in central Bhutan. The Black Mountains, which rise to 4,500–4,600 meters, are visible in the background. Credit: György Hetényi

Our GPS measurements confirm the relative motion of the newly defined microplate. These measurements also show that this microplate is rotating clockwise with respect to the Indian plate [Vernant et al., 2014]. The different behaviors of the two lithospheres are clearly expressed in their differences in flexural stiffness along the strike direction of the orogen (mountain belt). The flexural stiffness beneath Nepal is homogeneous [Berthet et al., 2013] but is comparatively weaker beneath Bhutan [Hammer et al., 2013].

A similar, but less well defined, deep seismicity zone, with distinct GPS vectors and flexural signatures, may mark another terrain boundary farther east along the Himalayas in Arunachal Pradesh [Hetényi et al., 2016a].

Not a Safe Haven

India’s 1897 Assam earthquake, which occurred farther south, is only a few human generations in the past and has not completely faded from memory. No event since then has reached magnitude 7 in Bhutan, and many of the local population believe that big earthquakes cannot happen there.

However, the return period of large Himalayan events is longer than oral history: Western Nepal, for example, has not experienced a significant event since 1505. It is true that over the past decades, the seismicity rate in Bhutan has been low, but we have found evidence of several great earthquakes in the past on the local megathrust.

Geomorphological analysis of uplifted river terraces in central Bhutan revealed two major events over the past millennium [Berthet et al., 2014]. A newly excavated paleoseismological trench has documented surface rupture during a medieval event and a 17th–18th century event [Le Roux-Mallouf et al., 2016]. Calculations based on newly translated historical eyewitness reports, macroseismic information, and reassessed damage reports have constrained a M8 ± 0.5 earthquake on 4 May 1714 [Hetényi et al., 2016b].

Thus, the seismic gap proved to be an information gap: The entire length of the Himalayas can generate earthquakes with a magnitude greater than 7.5, and it has done so in the past 500 years.

The landscape in eastern Bhutan, south of Trashigang, typically features incised valleys, steep slopes, and terraces. The hut in the center is shown in the inset for scale. The view here is to the east, and the hut is located at 27.2784°N, 91.4478°E. Credit: György Hetényi

Differences at Multiple Scales

The major change along the Himalayas occurs between their central western part (with a single convergence zone) and the eastern third (with distributed deformation including strike-slip motion), and the east–west extent of Bhutan exhibits even greater complexity. The crust appears to be smoothly descending in western Bhutan and is subhorizontal in the eastern part of the country [Singer et al., 2017a]. Our measurements of seismic wave speeds in the upper crust show important changes across the country, and they coincide well with the geological structure mapped at the surface [Singer et al., 2017b].

The most striking difference between western and eastern Bhutan is the crustal deformation pattern. In the west, the accommodation of present-day crustal shortening is very similar to the rest of the Himalayas: The plates in the megathrust region are fully locked [Vernant et al., 2014], and microseismicity (the occurrence of small events) is scattered across the crust [Diehl et al., 2017]. In the east, the locked segment of the megathrust is shorter, and it focuses most of the microseismic activity within a smaller region. Also, the fault appears to be creeping (sliding without producing significant seismicity) in both shallower and deeper segments [Marechal et al., 2016].

This variation of loading and background seismicity warrants further research along the entire Himalayan orogen because there is very little existing insight into variations of structures and processes at such short distance scales.

Gangkhar Puensum, a mountain in north central Bhutan, is clearly visible from the main road between Ura and Sengor, looking north-northwest. Gangkhar Puensum, at an altitude of 7,570 meters, is the highest unclimbed peak on Earth. For religious reasons, mountaineering above 6,000 meters is prohibited in Bhutan, so this record is very likely to remain. Credit: György Hetényi

Bhutan Is Moving Forward

Bhutan is an exotic place that has self-imposed isolation for a long time, but the country’s technology is now catching up at a rate that is higher than for the rest of the Himalayan regions. During our 2010 campaign, we used paper traveler’s checks, and we lacked individual cell phones. During our 2017 campaign, we had access to automated teller machines (ATMs) and 3G internet.

Likewise, our 7 years of field campaigns in this region have advanced our geophysical exploration and geodynamic understanding considerably. Still, there is a strong need to continue and build on the existing knowledge, which includes freely available seismological, gravity, and GPS data from our projects.

Focusing on three areas would help improve future development in Bhutan:

Broadening timescales. Acquiring long-term data needed to confirm or to adjust interpretations made on relatively short timescales is possible only with national observatories. We have launched seismology and GPS monitoring initiatives, and we hope for long-term funding and training of local manpower for all levels of operation.
Broadening investigations. Some fields of study have advanced dramatically, including work on glacial lake outburst floods and on landslides. Others, like seismic microzonation, have been limited so far and could benefit from more extensive efforts. There is also a strong need for up-to-date building codes that reflect the scientific knowledge coming from these investigations.
Increasing public awareness of natural hazards. The Bhutanese Ministry of Home and Cultural Affairs now has a full department devoted to disaster management that includes well-trained employees and comprehensive administration. However, education is the key to reaching the broadest population possible, which requires regular adaptation of school curricula and concise, practical information that local residents from any generation can understand.

We hope that recent efforts by our teams have promoted progress in the right direction. We also hope that large portions of the population will be sufficiently aware to deal with the next natural disaster. As our research shows, the next event may come sooner than previously thought.

The main Himalayan peaks in northwest Bhutan, on the border with southern Tibet, are, from left to right, Chomolhari, Jichu Drake, and Tserim Kang. Exact altitudes are debated, but Chomolhari is higher than 7,000 meters, and Tserim Kang towers above 6,500 meters. Credit: György Hetényi

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge all scientific, fieldwork, and logistical help provided by participants of the projects GANSSER and BHUTANEPAL, carried out in collaboration with the Department of Geology and Mines and the National Land Commission, Thimphu, Bhutan, and with support of Helvetas. Research highlighted in this article became possible thanks to the seed funding of the North-South Centre (ETH Zurich), followed by funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation (grants 200021_143467 and PP00P2_157627) and the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (grant 13-BS06-0006-01).

References

Berthet, T., et al. (2013), Lateral uniformity of India plate strength over central and eastern Nepal, Geophys. J. Int., 195, 1,481–1,493, https://doi.org/10.1093/gji/ggt357.

Berthet, T., et al. (2014), Active tectonics of the eastern Himalaya: New constraints from the first tectonic geomorphology study in southern Bhutan, Geology, 42, 427–430, https://doi.org/10.1130/G35162.1.

Diehl, T., et al. (2017), Seismotectonics of Bhutan: Evidence for segmentation of the eastern Himalayas and link to foreland deformation, Earth Planet. Sci. Lett., 471, 54–64, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2017.04.038.

Hammer, P., et al. (2013), Flexure of the India plate underneath the Bhutan Himalaya, Geophys. Res. Lett., 40, 4,225–4,230, https://doi.org/10.1002/grl.50793.

Hetényi, G., et al. (2016a), Segmentation of the Himalayas as revealed by arc-parallel gravity anomalies, Sci. Rep., 6, 33866, https://doi.org/10.1038/srep33866.

Hetényi, G., et al. (2016b), Joint approach combining damage and paleoseismology observations constrains the 1714 A.D. Bhutan earthquake at magnitude 8±0.5, Geophys. Res. Lett., 43, 10,695–10,702, https://doi.org/10.1002/2016GL071033.

Le Roux-Mallouf, R., et al. (2016), First paleoseismic evidence for great surface-rupturing earthquakes in the Bhutan Himalayas, J. Geophys. Res. Solid Earth, 121, 7,271–7,283, https://doi.org/10.1002/2015JB012733.

Marechal, A., et al. (2016), Evidence of interseismic coupling variations along the Bhutan Himalayan arc from new GPS data, Geophys. Res. Lett., 43, 12,399–12,406, https://doi.org/10.1002/2016GL071163.

Singer, J., et al. (2017a), The underthrusting Indian crust and its role in collision dynamics of the eastern Himalaya in Bhutan: Insights from receiver function imaging, J. Geophys. Res. Solid Earth, 122, 1,152–1,178, https://doi.org/10.1002/2016JB013337.

Singer, J., et al. (2017b), Along-strike variations in the Himalayan orogenic wedge structure in Bhutan from ambient seismic noise tomography, Geochem. Geophys. Geosyst., 18, 1,483–1,498, https://doi.org/10.1002/2016GC006742.

Vernant, P., et al. (2014), Clockwise rotation of the Brahmaputra Valley relative to India: Tectonic convergence in the eastern Himalaya, Naga Hills, and Shillong Plateau, J. Geophys. Res. Solid Earth, 119, 6,558–6,571, https://doi.org/10.1002/2014JB011196.

Author Information

György Hetényi (email: gyorgy.hetenyi@unil.ch), Faculty of Geosciences and Environment, Institute of Earth Sciences, University of Lausanne, Switzerland; Rodolphe Cattin, Géosciences Montpellier, University of Montpellier, France; and Dowchu Drukpa, Department of Geology and Mines, Ministry of Economic Affairs, Thimphu, Bhutan

See the full article here .

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

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