Comments

Yes, I know of this work and have followed it closely for at least 2-3 years. The seismology community is pushing hard for such an "Early Warning System". However, the name is a blatant misnomer. It works by the same principle as one could imagine to use for dodging a bullet: When the gun fires, you see a flash of light. Knowing that light travels at about 300,000 km/sec, but the bullet travels toward you at "only" supersonic 2-3 km/sec, you are supposed to have time to run for cover. The seismologists' latest "Early Warning System" works by trying to capture the P wave, after an earthquake has "fired", and to use it to calculate the arrival time of the destructive and potentially deadly S waves. P waves travel at about 6 km/sec, while the S waves travel at around 3.4 km/sec. If you are 12 km from the hypocenter, the time differential is 1.5 sec - barely enough to blink the eyes. If you are 120 km from the hypo- or epicenter, the time differential is about 15 sec. Some of this time, a few seconds using a supercomputer, goes into calculating that this is really a big earthquake and where it occurred. This leaves you with 10 sec at best to run for your life. Bucharest in Romania has a working system in operation, I understand, and there it makes (almost) sense. Bucharest is located about 140 km from a unique, well-defined earthquake source region, the Vrancea Zone, just 70 km wide, where magnitude 7 type earthquakes occur rather frequently at a depth of 80-90 km. This gives Bucharest around 20 sec time to calculate the event and issue an "early warning". Practically this translates into 12-15 sec in useful time. Enough to take action with technical installations, trains, power plants etc. but not really enough to allow "normal" people to react. What is most alarming is that the seismology community pushing for this "Early Warning System" in California is asking the local, state and federal governments to cough up hundreds of millions of dollars needed to install the necessary network of seismometers, of computing power and communication networks. At the same time they (as a group) refuse to even consider the work that a few of us "outsiders" are doing to understand the physics that underlies signals, which the Earth sends out weeks, days, hours before (most) major seismic events, worth $50K of funding. Cheerful as ever, Friedemann