Google working for Earthquake Prone Areas across the globe

Google Earthquake Prone Areas: On Tuesday Google announced that they were working on making all android phones a sensor for earthquakes.

They worked with the California governor’s office of emergency services and the United States geological survey to create this technology.

All android users with location services enabled will receive a full-screen notification if they are near an earthquake of 4.5 magnitudes or greater. The application will also show the magnitude of the quake as well as its distance from the user.

“If the phone detects something that it thinks may be an earthquake, it sends a signal to our earthquake detection server, along with a coarse location of where the shaking occurred.

The server then combines information from many phones to figure out if an earthquake is happening.

We're essentially racing the speed of light - which is roughly the speed at which signals from phone travel - against the speed of an earthquake and lucky for us, the speed of light is much faster!" explains Marc Stogaitis principal software engineer, android.

Google Earthquake Prone Areas - Each Android phone is equipped with a motion-sensing accelerometer which will be able to detect earthquakes. Google has worked with globally renowned seismology and disaster experts Dr. Richard Allen, Dr. Lucy Jones, and Dr. Qingkai Kong to establish this method of using phones to detect earthquakes around the world. Today android has over 2 billion devices all over the world.

This will be powered by California's office of emergency services application called Shakealert. The application detects earthquakes with the data transmitted by 700 seismometers installed all around the state by UGSC, Cal OES, university of California Berkeley, and the California Institute of technology.

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Unfortunately, every earthquake-prone area cannot afford such technology in their states, hence google is working towards the development of this project explained March Stogaitis.

For the apple users, we suggest using the Myshake application.