Living in a seismic hot spot has its pros and cons. My grandfather died from injuries he sustained during the last big quake in Kobe. My family is not immune to the effects of a trembling planetary shell. Perhaps this is part of the reason why they fascinate me so.
After moving to San Francisco, several months went by before I was able to experience my first trembler. Thats not to say I wasn’t around for the nearly hourly quakes. I just didn’t feel the first few hundred that rolled beneath my feet. They weren’t strong enough (or I wasn’t sensitive enough).
The first quake I felt was subtle, but rewarding. It was a 3.4 south of Berkeley if I remember correctly. I loved it! It was always strange to me that I could hope for something so violent, but with the catch that it shouldn’t be so intense that I lose valuables. And nobody should be injured, of course.
The view of the city from the top of my building is phenomenal. Its not uncommon for me to be up there late at night and invariably, my thoughts turn to how it would look if a huge shockwave rolled through the city from beyond downtown. Would I see the buildings sway before the shockwave hit me? Would the city lights go out before I felt anything? Would I see a ripple? What would it sound like?
This thinking led me to revisit a piece I started shortly after feeling that first quake. After Googling about, I came across the USGS recent earthquake site. It is the first bookmark in my Daily Visitations bookmark bar. And without fail, if I am near a computer when a quake hits, I bring up the USGS site and hit refresh repeatedly until the data shows up. I need to know how big the square is going to be. Thats all it comes down to. These horribly ominous red squares. The more area the square covers, the more lives are effected. (Also, my my, what happens with 8.0 or higher? Why is there no square preview for that? Is it because if an 8.0 or higher hits, the internet will go away?)
Sadly though, I cannot seem to find a system for getting the data in real time. Quick pokes about the intertubes has proved to me that services exist, but they cost thousand and thousands of dollars. Meh. Id use the Sudden Motion Sensorâ„¢ in my laptop, but that wouldn’t help me triangulate the data, not to mention the constant construction near my office would register a ton of false positives.
The current goal of this project is fairly nebulous. Right now I am content with exploring Earthquake-Driven Compositional Studies. The ultimate goal is to make earthquake responsive installations, but again, real-time data would be preferred. Although there is something conceptually sound about making an installation that only activates if a huge earthquake rumbles through. The one time you could see it in its true form is also the time where such aesthetic concerns take backseat to the flight response. Fun! On the flip side, how shitty would it be to make such a device and find that in the moment of Richter-based vigorously shaking truth, the thing malfunctions cause your code was wrong.
and image how confused the archaeologists of the future would be if they found a interactive installation designed to trigger during an earthquake… we would straight away be labeled as earthquake worshiping pagans.
It would be easy enough to build everything but the sensor systems and then solve the sensor problem. I’m fairly certain that Make magazine is going to run an article on how to make your own earthquake detector sooner or later.
Detecting an earthquake is a good start, but being able to triangulate the location or at least the direction of the source is the key. Not sure how to do that without setting up a handful of sensors a good distance apart. Time will tell…
well, if you build a p2p service that communicates the values of the Sudden Motion Sensor, you only need to mash it up with a webservice like Plazes to know where everbody who is participating is at that point in time… then it’s just a matter of getting all the geo aware data to a safe spot where it can be processed (ideally non-earthquaky-territory
well it’s pretty easy to find out the location of the ISP from where a user connected (see for example the interactive map that analytics.google creates for your website). With that you could gather the “trembling” values associated to the location of the ISP from where they access.
Maybe with some heavy math and the “trembling” values associated to a set of different ISP locations you could derive an hypothetical map of where were those values (based on interpolation and waves spread)
What’s best, in my opinion, would be to create a network of “sensors” (like those in each powerbook, if they can sense the shakes of a earthquake) that communicate to a central node their trembling… when enough “sensors” communicate at the same time that they received a shake, the central node could start looking various feeds (news, geo centers, etc) to search where the earthquake happened….
mmmmh :-S
Do I understand your topmost illustration right: The negative length of the “pillars” corresponds to the time span up to now whereas the thickness corresponds to the magnitude?
BTW, I appreciate your way of throwing in simple full circles and rings everywhere, so to speak. It’s simple, it’s effective, it has style. Pretty cool, mate.
Actually, right now, the length of the pillars represents the depth of the earthquake’s center. The depth has been exaggerated in that image. The thickness corresponds to magnitude.
And man, I was looking for a simple solution! Now you all have me thinking about buying $50,000 worth of macbooks and sending them around california and nevada and hooking them into a system where they could send me data if they start shaking?? HA! That would be quite the experiment for sure, but the simplistic side of me just wants a service to ping me when there is a quake. They are working on early warning alarms for tsunamis… I figure early warning earthquakes are possible too. Not sure how fast a shockwave travels though. Might not actually help anyone. Assuming you are close enough to the center to really experience damage from the quake, it would hit you sooner or around the same time as it hit the nearest seismic outpost. If you are far enough away from the quake, you could get warned in advance of hit arriving, but if it is going to do no damage, that warning isnt very useful. hmmmm…