In the past 7 days the area near Papua New Guinea has had 56 earthquakes larger than 4.3.  This included a magnitude 7.1 and a magnitude 7.5.  This area experiences large earthquakes quite frequently.  In the past 5 years there have been 40 events larger than magnitude 6 and 2651 events greater than magnitude 4.

l downloaded csv files from the USGS and made a couple histograms and a plot of time vs depth for the past 7 days. These plots can be seen here.

A team of geophysicists have established a proof of concept technique that uses smart phones as an early warning system for earthquakes.  The core of this concept utilizes the fact that smart phones have become prolific and are continuing to increase in number.  The idea is to have a ‘network’ of people’s phones and use the gps and accelerometer of the phone to measure movement.  The proof of concept analysis determined that this network of phones could accurately determine earthquake size and estimate the epicenter.

That then allows the app to send early warning notifications to users around the event.  Warning times could be issued.  The article states, “Assuming only a small number of potentially available smart phones would be active at any moment, the team found that phones representing 0.2 percent of the study area’s population – about 4,700 people – could trigger an alert for the Hayward quake within five seconds of its onset. That would represent a few seconds’ warning time for San Francisco and tens of seconds for San Jose that major shaking was on its way.”  The warning time, although not huge, could allow people to be better prepared for the shaking when it arrives.

You can find the article here.