Tag: Seismology

Dutch scientist’s prediction of earthquake on Oct 3 turns out be accurate, but…

This is not the first time that Frank Hoogerbeets made bold earthquake prediction that turned out to be accurate Photograph:(Twitter)

Just days after a Dutch scientist predicted a massive quake in Pakistan, a temblor rocked South Asia, but well over a thousand of miles away in Nepal, and it was 6.2 on the Richter scale, making its tremors felt near Indian capital Delhi and adjoining areas in northern region.

Frank Hoogerbeets, a researcher of the Solar System Geometry Survey (SSGEOS) — an organisation based in The Netherlands — on September 29, claimed that Pakistan would face a catastrophic earthquake.

He claimed to have detected an unusual increase in electric charge fluctuations along the fault lines in Balochistan’s Chaman area.

He even predicted the date of the earthquake, anywhere between October 1 and 3, adding that this would be “critical” for Pakistan.

“Planetary geometry is difficult to interpret with four conjunctions spread out over the next 10 days. As far as I can tell, 1-3 October will be more critical,” he said on social media X on Sept 29.

Earthquake in Nepal and India

On Wednesday, that is October 3, this is exactly what happened. A major earthquake occurred in the afternoon, but not in Pakistan.

Rather the tremors were recorded well over a thousand miles away in neighbouring Nepal and in northern parts of India.

Nepal was jolted by four earthquakes that occurred in a span of one hour, leaving a trail of damage in western Bajhang district, and at least 12 injured.

So far, no reports of casualties have emerged either in India or Nepal.

Prediction came right yet again

Notably, this is not the first time that Hoogerbeets made a bold earthquake prediction which turned out to be accurate.

He earlier claimed that tremors would devastate Turkey and Syria, which in fact came true in February this year which killed more than 50,000 people.

He estimated ‘strong to major’ seismic activity of 7.1 magnitude on March 16 in the Kermadec Islands and a 6.8 magnitude earthquake near the coast of Ecuador on March 18. Both his predictions were accurate.

The phones that detect earthquakes

Fifty years since the first mobile phone call, the technology we carry around in our pocket is helping to create the world’s biggest earthquake detection system.

On 25 October 2022, a 5.1-magnitude earthquake jolted California’s Bay Area. Fortunately, it was more of a than a violent shake, but reports from residents across the region flooded into the United States Geological Survey (USGS) from those who had felt it. There was no damage reported, but the earthquake was significant in another way – many people in the area received alerts on their phones before the shaking started.

More crucially still, many of these phones helped detect the earthquake in the first place, too.

Google has been working with USGS and academics at a number of universities in California to develop an early warning system that alerts users a few seconds before tremors arrive. It is a brief window of warning, but a few seconds can give enough time to shelter under a table or desk. It can also be enough time to slow trains, stop planes from taking off or landing and keep cars from entering bridges or tunnels. As such, this system is likely to save lives when stronger quakes hit.

It uses data from two sources. Initially, the system relied upon a network of the 700 seismometers – devices that detect earth tremors – installed across the state by seismologists at USGS, the California Institute of Technology and University of California Berkeley and the state government. (Seismometers in two other US states – Oregon and Washington – also feed into the system, known as ShakeAlert.) But Google has also been creating what is the world’s largest earthquake detection network through phones owned by members of the public.

Most smartphones running Google’s Android operating system have on-board accelerometers – the circuitry which detects when a phone is being moved. These are most commonly used to tell the phone to re-orientate its display from portrait to landscape mode when it is tilted, for example, and also helps provide information about step-count for Google’s onboard fitness tracker.

But the sensors are surprisingly sensitive, and can also act like a mini seismometer.

Google has introduced a function that allows users to allow their phone to automatically send data to the Android Earthquake Alerts System, if their device picks up vibrations that are characteristic of the Primary (P) waves of an earthquake. By combining data from thousands or even millions of other phones, the system can work out whether an earthquake is happening and where. It can then send out alerts to phones in the area where the seismic waves are likely to hit, giving an early warning.

And because radio signals travel faster than seismic waves, the alerts can arrive before the shaking starts in areas away from the epicentre.

Marc Stogaitis, a software engineer at Android, put it like this: “We’re essentially racing the speed of light (which is roughly the speed at which signals from a phone travel) against the speed of an earthquake. And lucky for us, the speed of light is much faster!”

As most of the data is crowdsourced, the technology opens up the possibility of monitoring for earthquakes in areas where there aren’t extensive networks of expensive seismometers. It means raises the possibility of providing earthquake alerts in even remote and poorer regions of the world.

In October 2022, engineers at Google saw phones across the San Francisco Bay Area light up with earthquake detection data as the seismic waves travelled outwards from the epicentre.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230405-the-phones-that-detect-earthquakes

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