How your Android smartphone predicts earthquakes

Your Android phone hides a great power that you may have never heard of: it can detect earthquakes before you feel them.

Since 2020, Google has transformed billions of smartphones into mini-seismographers thanks to Android Earthquake Alert (AEA). However,

This system uses the accelerometers of our phones to create the largest seismic detection network in the world. Therefore, Result: 2.5 billion people in 98 countries can receive an alert up to several minutes before shaking.

Billions of how your android smartphone predicts seismographers in our pockets

The idea is great in its simplicity: all Android smartphones have an accelerometer to count your steps. Similarly, run the screen. However, Google realized that these sensors could also detect the vibrations of earthquakes. For example, When your phone is put on a table, it should not move. Consequently, But if the earth trembles, the accelerometer instantly detects it.

The Android Earthquake. Alert (AEA) system has been activated by default on most Android phones since 2020. It is constantly monitored when your phone is motionless, looking for specific signatures of P and S waves of earthquakes.

But how how your android smartphone predicts can we distinguish an earthquake from a passing truck? This is where collective intelligence comes into play: Google analyzes the data of millions of phones simultaneously. If many devices in the same area detect the same vibrations according to a diagram coherent with an earthquake. then the alert is triggered.

How your android smartphone predicts

Faster than science fiction

System performance is stunning. Seismic waves travel relatively slowly in the earth’s crust, but the internet signals spin at the speed of light. This difference creates a precious time window to prevent populations.

Concrete example: During an earthquake in the Philippines in 2023, the phones detected the first waves in 12 seconds. Six seconds later. the alerts already left, preventing the areas that were going to undergo the most violent tremors up to 15 seconds in advance. For the big earthquake in Türkiye, the alerts could have arrived more than a how your android smartphone predicts minute before shaking.

The system offers two types of alerts: be careful for more distant areas (standard notification with its distinctive). and intervene for nearby areas (full screen with messages like “protect yourself” or “sleep, cover yourself”). The latter even ignores the mode “Do not disturb”.

Since its launch, AEA has detected 1,279 seismic events, of magnitude 1.9 to 7.8. On this impressive number, only three false alerts.

The errors are instructive: one caused by another alert system which simultaneously vibrate many phones. and two how your android smartphone predicts due to violent thunderstorms with thunderclaps which has created localized vibrations. Google has since improved modeling to avoid these confusion.

More than a third of people who could have received an alert actually received it before feeling the tremors. A quarter received it during the earthquake, and another quarter right after.

Before AEA, only a few countries had seismographic networks capable of sending alerts. Google has extended this capacity to 98 countries at once, or 2.5 billion people. The system now sends around 60 alerts per month, affecting 18 million people.