MyShake, a revolutionary earthquake detection app released by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, turns your phone into seismology tool, watching for and warning users before the damaging seismic waves arrive. Ever its launch the app has already detected over 200 earthquakes in more than ten countries.
“We found that MyShake could detect large earthquakes, but also small ones, which we never thought would be possible,” says Qingkai Kong from the University of California, Berkeley, who is a co-creator of the app.
A paper published in Geophysical Research Letters says:
On a typical day about 8000 phones provide acceleration waveform data to the MyShake archive. The on-phone app can detect and trigger on P waves and is capable of recording magnitude 2.5 and larger events. The largest number of waveforms from a single earthquake to date comes from the M5.2 Borrego Springs earthquake in Southern California, for which MyShake collected 103 useful three-component waveforms. The network continues to grow with new downloads from the Google Play store everyday and expands rapidly when public interest in earthquakes peaks such as during an earthquake sequence.
Location: UC Berkeley
URL: MyShake
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