It’s a hard image to forget: a surveillence camera capturing the start of Haiti’s recent earthquake. Moments after the shaking started, buildings had already begun to collapse. Had there been even a few seconds warning, thousands of lives might have been saved. That’s the goal of an early warning system now being developed at UC Berkeley’s Seismology Lab. Project leader Richard Allen explains the system is not predicting quakes. “What we are doing,” Allen says, “is rapidly detecting the beginings of the earthquake and then we’re predicting the ground shaking and that means we can have a few seconds warning.” The system relies on hundreds of motion sensors -called seismometers- stationed along California’s active earthquake faults. The seismometers are linked to special computers, called “dataloggers,” which analyze the initial waves of a quake and predict it’s power. Dr. Peggy Hellweg, another project leader, says the bigger the earthquake, the longer it takes to develop. “The Haiti earthquake for example was a magnitude 7, it took about 30 seconds to actually happen- the zipping and unzipping of the earth, so to speak,” Hellweg says. Depending on the quake’s strength and distance from major population centers, seismologists hope to give as much as a minute of warning – but say tens of seconds is more likely. Still, even 30 seconds could be enough time to take cover or get outside, move away from dangerous equipment or chemicals – even slow trains, divert aircraft and protect the power grid. Alerts might come through radio, television, even cell phones– much the way similar earthquake warning systems work right now in Japan and Mexico City. Project managers say it will take 5 years and about $80-million dollars to build a functioning system in California, and even then, it won’t be perfect. But, in a state plagued by earthquakes, any warning- even a few seconds- could save lives.<\/p>\n
-Claudia Cowan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s a hard image to forget: a surveillence camera capturing the start of Haiti’s recent earthquake. Moments after the shaking started, buildings had already begun to collapse. Had there been even a few seconds warning, thousands of lives might have been saved. That’s the goal of an early warning system now being developed at UC […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4809,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-241748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4809"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241748\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}