It’s rare, but every now and then multi-billion dollar megacorps do something altruistic and unequivocally positive. Take Google’s Earthquake Alert system for Android. In 2020, the company began sending near-instant alerts about an impending earthquake to users on the West Coast of the US. Now it’s also available in all 50 states and all US territories.
Earthquake Alerts use distributed data from the gyroscopic sensors in millions of Android phones to detect simultaneous shaking, detecting an earthquake in real time and sending an alert to all surrounding phones if anything above a 3 on the MMI scale is registered. At 4.5 or higher, a more intense “Take Action” alert is sent. At best, this should give people a few seconds to take cover or get out of immediately dangerous situations.
In California, Oregon and Washington, where earthquakes are much more common, the system also sends alerts using the US Geological Survey’s ShakeAlert system.
In addition to the US mainland, Alaska and Hawaii, the system is now also operational in Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands, among others. According to Google’s blog post, the technology is already active in 97 other countries and territories, although Japan, Indonesia and China are notably missing from the list.
