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単語数: 348語

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作成日: 2024/09/09 20:44

更新日: 2025/12/08 10:43

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How AI is helping scientists finally predict earthquakes
Eric Spitznagel

When a 4.4-magnitude earthquake rattled Los Angeles on Aug.13, it didn’t come as a complete surprise to everybody. About a million Californians got an early alert on their phones that a quake was imminent.

How did it happen? It was thanks to the newly-developed MyShake app, created by researchers at the University of Berkeley, in partnership with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. The app basically works as a crowdsourced detector, collecting motion data from phones across the West Coast — from California up to Washington State — and sends out alerts based on a phone’s location.

A screengrab from the MyShake app, one of the first digital tools to help predict temors. MyShake/ YouTube

Visitors in Nagaksaki, Japan crouch following an earthquake alert this past August. AP
It’s not a lot of advance notice. “The amount of warning varies from a few seconds to tens of seconds depending on the location of the quake and the availability of phones,” says Richard Allen, Ph.D, the director of the University of California Berkley’s Seismology Lab, who helped develop the tech.

It might seem like nothing — how much difference can a few seconds really make — but in the field of earthquake forecasting, it might as well be the invention of the telephone. For years, the idea of being able to predict an earthquake wasn’t just unlikely. As seismologist Allie Hutchison wrote for the MIT Technology Review, the very idea of it was deemed unserious as recently as 2013, “as outside the realm of mainstream research as the hunt for the Loch Ness Monster.”

Many prominent scientists still feel that way. “I’ve studied earthquakes for more than 50 years and I have seen many studies from scientists who reported precursory phenomena to significant earthquakes,” says Tom Heaton, a geophysicist at Caltech. “In my experience, no one has developed a system to predict earthquakes. I strongly believe that this is a problem in self-organizing chaos. This is an important field of physics that is mostly unfamiliar to earth scientists.”

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