Software that turns ordinary computer hard drives into makeshift quake sensors, and connects machines to form a quake-monitoring network, has been released for free on the web.
Although experts say the technique is unlikely to replace standard scientific equipment, computer hard drives can provide rough estimates of the intensity and location of an earthquake and warn of an impending tsunami.
Hard drives contain tiny vibration sensors that warn when a device is being shaken so that delicate components can be automatically locked in one place. A damaged drive led US technology consultant Michael Stadler to realise that these sensors might also be able to detect the seismic vibration caused by an earthquake.
"A friend had their hard drive fail due to the vibration from nearby construction work," Stadler told New Scientist. So he decided to write a piece of software, called the Tsunami Hard Disk Detector, that monitors hard drive vibration and links computers together in order to spot and map earthquakes.
"A hard drive is not sensitive enough to detect as accurately as a seismometer," says Stadler. "But in a peer-to-peer network you can use geographic patterns to identify the direction a seismic wave is travelling, and perhaps the epicentre."
Stadler's software was made freely available online and has been downloaded around 2500 times so far, mostly by users in Asia. Users can enter the latitude and longitude of their machine and are automatically connected together to form a decentralised network.
If an earthquake occurs nearby, the network maps the strength and timing of vibrations to reveal the epicentre of the quake. The results of the analysis are then instantly available to any computer running the software. And irrelevant vibrations are discounted by only looking for signals that are picked up by several different machines.
Information collected by a couple of hundred users successfully identified the earthquake that that struck the south coast of Java in July 2006 and which triggered a tsunami (see Java tsunami death toll over 300). But Stadler admits the system is imperfect. "The official strength was 7.7 on the Richter scale, the Hard Disk Detector said 5.9," says Stadler. "There's more work to do but it shows the concept can work." He notes that the system has failed to detect several other earthquakes.
Suleyman Nalbant, a geophysicist at the University of Ulster in the UK, says seismometers dotted across the globe can easily pick up quakes like the one that hit Java. But if the hard drive system could detect smaller earthquakes "it could be very useful", he says. "The global network is sometimes not perfect for smaller events."
In practice, however, problems with accuracy might prevent this, Nalbant says: "I'm not sure the sensors can really be that accurate".
Bruce Malamud, an expert on natural hazards at Kings College London, UK, is also sceptical. "It's very novel," he says. "But to make a real difference you'd probably need a very large number of computers using the software."
Stadler's system was awarded a prize for innovative use of the internet at the Ars Electronica fair held in Linz, Austria, between 31 August and 5 September.
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