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Google alert failed to warn people of Turkey earthquake
(www.bbc.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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That makes sense. Google's approach surprises me actually; in that blog announcement you linked, they say they rely on California seismologists, at least for that state, to identify quakes, but in this article it says Google relies specifically on the accelerometers in phones to detect the earthquakes, which seems ridiculous and error prone.
Maybe it's not on a macro scale with millions of phones, but I'd like to read a study, article or explanation on why Google decided to use groups of tiny accelerometers above the surface of the Earth rather than aggregating data from seismic and geologic research centers better suited to to identify earthquakes, and the efficacy of that crowdsourced earthquake detection method.
The researchers mentioned in the google blog post actually developed another smartphone-based system prior to working with google, called MyShake. You can find various research paper about it if you search "MyShake" in google scholar. Here is one example: https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.1501055
I imagine they use a similar system at google since they collaborate with those researchers.
Another related article about MyShake: https://temblor.net/earthquake-insights/earthquake-early-warning-google-myshake-shakealert-update-14780/
Okay, that's very interesting, thank you for linking the articles.
So it isn't that the accelerometers or myshake work flawlessly, it's that the earthquake detection systems we have now are so rare in countries that at least crowdsourced earthquake detection using phones is better than the no-warning-at-all that most of the world has.
And since with so many accelerometers, some number of them are going to detect an active earthquake, they're able to relay that information to those potentially soon-to-be affected. That is pretty cool.
Seems like a bad move for Google to announce that alert service without any disclaimers about efficacy knowing that quakes will occur but myshake or whatever equivalent service they're using is only potentially effective before the quake hits.