Seismologists at the University of California at Riverside and Stanford University are creating an earthquake-detection network on the cheap by using distributed-computing technology to link up laptop computers that have built-in motion sensors. The researchers’ Quake-Catcher Network has already detected several quakes — in Nevada in April and in Los Angeles in late July.
The system is the brainchild of Elizabeth Cochran, an assistant professor of seismology at Riverside. Volunteers download special software that quickly reports sudden motions to a central server on the Internet. If the server receives reports of sudden motions from several computers in different places simultaneously, it determines that an earthquake probably caused them.
Laptop manufacturers have been adding motion sensors — accelerometers — that protect data by turning off machines’ hard drives in case the machines are dropped. The earthquake-sensing software is only active when a computer is not in use for anything else. The software checks each laptop’s IP address to determine where the machine is located, and also checks to make sure the machine’s internal clock is accurate. —Lawrence Biemiller
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