Earthquake Early Warning System Pioneered in Japan

Tomo Hiratsuka writes "After recent destructive earthquakes around the world, Japanese scientists have come up with an earthquake early-warning system that uses sensors and various technologies, including iPv6, to provide up to a minute's warning, which could make a lot of difference, especially in the event of a tsunami. Bizarrely, one of the warning methods even involves networked photocopiers, believe it or not."

Comments

Earthquake *prediction* networks soon?

[SysKoll]

The warning method described in TFA is nice, but it would be much better to have some early warning (hours to days) that an earthquake is imminent. The december issue of IEEE Spectrum contains an article describing what technology could be used.

Most of it is surprisingly simple -- the problem being that the physics of earthquake is not well understood yet. For instance, people often observed eerie lighs in the sky in the hours before a quake. Turns out that rock squeezed along a rift can free up eletrons, which means that huge currents flow accross the soil when the pressure is maximum -- right before a quake. It also seems to generate VLF noise (around 0.01 Hz). A simple pair of metal plates separated by an airgap can detect the chance of air conductivity, along with a VLF receptor, can thus form a good earthquake forecast station.

Of course, nobody really knows why these eletrical phenomenon occurs before a quake. But they still can be observed.

US and Mexico have versions too

[peter303]

The US Southern Calfornia Earthquake Center has had several versions in place (also) since the late 1980s. Oil company refineries, L.A. Metro Rail, and gas utility companies are among important customers.

Of course the early version had some snafus in the 1994 Northridge quake. At that time it was pager-based and pager buffer overflowed with lesser aftershocks. They fixed it up in time to successfully warn construction crews repairing freeway overpasses.

Mexico has been working on this equally long. They can experience magnitude eight quakes off its western shores. But by the time these seismic waves reach Mexico City several minutes later, they're peak energy is just that to resonate skyscapers which were built in the old Aztec lake bed. Early years there were a number of false alarms, but some successes too. As with Japan and the US, the current systems are more robust.