My Shake application for smartphones proved its value in earthquakes

The developers of the mobile application, which turns smartphones into earthquake detectors, share their first impressions of the results. My Shake was launched in February this year for mobile devices based on Android. Currently, the application has been downloaded by users more than 200,000 times. When the phone is running, seismic activity monitoring starts, which allows you to track potentially dangerous areas, which means avoiding a large number of victims in earthquakes.

The application displays even insignificant seismic activity

What is especially valuable for the staff of the University of California at Berkeley (namely, they were responsible for the development of MyShake) is the definition of a potentially dangerous zone that was previously considered quiet. Users managed to find underground tremors with a magnitude of 5.8 points in the state of Oklahoma. Experts attribute the increase in seismic activity in the region with the increase in the number of oil and gas fields and their active development. It is believed that the rapid injection of water, which is used to rupture the seams in the extraction of oil shale, can increase the likelihood of earthquakes.

A new word in the monitoring of seismogenic zones

Up to this point, the biggest breakthrough in the monitoring of seismic activity was considered to be maps reflecting the state of affairs in real time. However, the warning systems of people in the area of potential danger, stuck at the level of the last century. In other words, an earthquake can happen at any time, and seismologists will know about it. Nevertheless, a large number of victims will not be avoided. The MyShake application perfectly remedies this flaw. This development is especially useful for residents of seismically active regions.

How it works

The application builds an accelerometer in the mobile device, sensitive to fluctuations in space.

Any change in the position of the phone is immediately fixed, and then information is processed. Vibrations and tremors, marked in a horizontal position, are instantly compared with the model of a real earthquake. Then the smartphone starts the search for P-waves, the predecessors of more destructive S-tremors. All collected data is sent over a mobile network in Berkeley, the headquarters of MyShake. And the central system will begin to determine the source of the earthquake and its magnitude. As we can see, scientists managed to develop a complex algorithm that was specially "trained" to distinguish between vibrations created by man. Thus, any daily traffic of users is immediately excluded from the category of potentially dangerous.

Ease of use

The application does not require power on and off and is able to work in the background, similar to fitness applications that can monitor the motor activity of users.

The results exceeded expectations

According to Professor Richard Allen, one of the co-authors of the development, MyShake showed even more than what was expected of it. For example, scientists did not expect to recognize seismic activity with a magnitude of 2.5 points, especially in regions that until then had been considered relatively calm. The development can detect shocks at great depths (up to 350 meters). The radius of the focus was also large. So, users who were 200 kilometers from the epicenter of the Borrego Springs earthquake, mobile devices worked.

As for more serious disturbances in the earth's crust, in April of this year, Ecuador recorded an earthquake of magnitude 7.8 on the Richter scale. The application MyShake was able to pinpoint it, and again at great distances. From a scientific point of view, specialists from Berkeley managed to create an ideal product, taking into account several components at once. Now it's a small matter: to learn how to effectively use the data that can be collected.

New version of the application

Apparently, scientists are not going to stop there. During the speech at the autumn meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), Professor Allen presented a new version of the application, which now sends notifications to its users. This is a key step in modernization, because eventually developers are planning to create an early warning system that will prevent people a few minutes before the manifestation of seismic activity. This time should be enough to have time to move to a safe haven and turn off electrical appliances.