Quake-Detection App Captured Nearly 400 Temblors Worldwide

The June 10 earthquake near Borrego Springs in San Diego County, a 5.2-magnitude temblor, triggered 103 smartphones with MyShake installed (green dots). The blue star is the epicenter, the red dots are MyShake phones that were not ready to trigger, probably because of human activity, while the yellow-orange dots are phones that were primed but did not trigger.

Credit: UC Berkeley

The app can detect quakes as small as magnitude 2.5, with the best sensitivity in areas with a greater density of phones. The largest number of phones to record a quake was 103, after the 5.2 magnitude quake that occurred on the San Jacinto fault near Borrego Springs in San Diego County on June 10. Phones 200 kilometers from the epicenter detected that temblor. The largest quake detected occurred on April 16 in Ecuador: a 7.8 magnitude quake that triggered two phones, 170 and 200 kilometers from the epicenter.

Allen, Kong and their colleagues at Deutsche Telekom’s Silicon Valley Innovation Center believe the app’s performance shows it can complement traditional seismic networks, such as that operated nationally by the U.S. Geological Survey, but can also serve as a stand-alone system in places with few seismic stations, helping to reduce injuries and damage from earthquakes.

While the app has detected quakes in seismically active areas such as Chile, Mexico, New Zealand, Taiwan, Japan and the West Coast of the U.S., one surprising hot spot has been the traditionally quiet state of Oklahoma. The practice of injecting oil well wastewater deep underground has activated faults in the area to the extent that the state is rattled hundreds of times a year.

“Oklahoma is now clearly No. 1 in terms of the number of earthquakes in the lower 48 states,” Kong said.

Most of Oklahoma’s earthquakes are small, but MyShake users in the state, which number only about 200, easily detected the Sept. 3 magnitude 5.8 quake, the strongest ever to hit the state. During that event, 14 phones in the state triggered, but even this relatively small number of phones allowed the seismology lab to peg the magnitude within 1 percent of estimates from ground seismic stations, and located the epicenter to within 4 kilometers (2.5 miles).

“These initial studies suggest that the data will be useful for a variety of scientific studies of induced seismicity phenomena in Oklahoma, as well as having the potential to provide earthquake early warning in the future,” Kong said.

He summarized the Oklahoma data during a poster session on Friday, Dec. 16.

Richard Allen explains how MyShake can help detect earthquakes and eventually provide early warning for smartphone users.

(Video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally)

The MyShake app and the computer algorithm behind it were developed by Allen, Kong and a team of programmers at the Silicon Valley Innovation Center in Mountain View, California, which is part of the Telekom Innovation Laboratories (T-Labs) operated by Deutsche Telekom, owner of T-Mobile. Louis Schreier, the leader of that team, co-wrote a paper with Allen and Kong on the first six months of MyShake’s observations, published Sept. 29 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

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