For California, an Earthquake Early Warning System Is Up and Running

autospa writes "In California's Coachella Valley around Palm Springs, a state-of-the-art, first-in-the-world earthquake early warning system in now installed and operational. Twelve locations are now in place with 120 sites planned, all meant to detect an earthquake and give people a chance to get under a table, or in the case of a fire station, get the engines outside of the building."

Interesting idea, horrible article

[jlechem]

Let's see 3 paragraphs with no real info. What seismic level are they talking about? A 2, 3, 4, 5, or what? In Utah we got lots of 2 and 3s all the time. California is even worse. Who decides when it's time to hit the panic button? And if it's a person that means they have to have staff available 24x7. Still it seems pretty cool they're trying to solve this problem.

Re:Interesting idea, horrible article

[iamhigh]

You should check out Nova Science Now on PBS. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/ [pbs.org] They had a segment on this last night. I am sure they have an article about it, but what would /. be without indirect sources?

Yep... here it is.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/earthquake-detection.html [pbs.org]

Re:It uses video cameras and cats

[pixelpusher220]

Your argument is flawed, but I understand your confusion :)

Events that are unrelated to one another, such as games of Blackjack from independent decks of cards, correctly do not influence the other events.

However, the CA quakes are not unrelated events. They occur because one tectonic plate is slipping past another. The longer that slip does not happen, the greater likelihood that it will happen in the future. The slip *will* happen. When it does, it will depend on how much force is built up.

Considering the force behind a moving tectonic plate is massive, the longer it is pent up without slippage means that energy is being stored up until a failure at some point along the fault and it breaks free. It is possible that we will see a series of smaller quakes rather than a big one, but simple physics dictate that once the object (plate) starts moving it's going to keep on moving unless equivalent force is applied to stop it.


(This new formatting system is sucky sucky. I'm using HTML formatting but it's still making the lines massively separated :( )