The Fault in the Facts: A new Android feature gives Alaskans an early earthquake warning

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - A new Android feature can give users a few seconds heads up if an earthquake is headed their way.

State Seismologist and Alaska Earthquake Center Director Michael West said there isn’t another broadly distributed early warning system in Alaska for people who don’t use phones with the Android operating system. Even with this new feature, West said the state still does not have a full-fledged early warning program.

The warning times depend on the Android user’s distance to the epicenter, West said.

“In some cases, there may be no warning at all, and the alert may well arrive long after the earthquake,” West said. “But for other earthquakes that start further away — several seconds, in some cases, several tens of seconds, potentially a minute becomes a real possibility.”

Instead of using seismic stations to detect earthquakes, the feature uses a sensor called an accelerometer, West said.

“Every cellphone has in it essentially a small, very low-grade seismic instrument,” West said. “That’s how your phone knows how to do a lot of things, like when it’s being held landscape or portrait and it adjusts automatically ... There are a lot of users out there, and it is possible to extract from that some sense of the seismic shaking.”

West said this feature helps show what’s possible for an Alaska early warning system.

The Android-based system has its limitations though because it won’t pick up data across long distances, such as in the middle of the ocean.

“You need sensors, of whatever type, close to where the earthquakes are happening, which may or may not be where the people are that you’re interested in alerting,” West said.

West said it would be interesting to see how the warning plays out in that situation.

There’s another system called Shake Alert that’s in some Pacific Northwest states and parts of Canada, but not in Alaska yet. It uses seismic stations to send early warnings. It also connects to automated systems and can trigger an action like opening firehouse doors or closing a gas valve.

Scientists cannot predict earthquakes, but the new Android feature, as well as ShakeAlert, can provide an early warning.

“’Next Thursday, four o’clock, be ready for an earthquake.’ That does not exist, and most scientists believe that that will never exist,” West said.

To learn more about ShakeAlert and earthquake early warning, check out the Fault in the Facts episode titled “Can scientists predict earthquakes?”

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