Earthquake Forecast Google is Showing Hope

Is Earthquake Forecast really possible? Can earthquakes be predicted? You might know was there just an earthquake in Los Angeles or was there just an earthquake in southern California, by their after-effects. Earthquake; A catastrophe of nature. On average, there are ten earthquakes of different magnitude on the earth every hour. Tech giant Google is working on this earthquake. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that Google is planning to build an earthquake forecasting system as their next big project.

What is Google saying?

Google recently tested using fiber optic cable forecast for earthquake, this technology can provide earthquake and tsunami warnings around the world. There is a long history of using optical fiber for alert, forecasting, or sensing applications.

However, most of these strategies are effective at distances up to a maximum of 100 km. Google says it is moving toward a technology that can cover distances of more than a few thousand kilometers.

And in this work, it is possible to use ordinary fiber under the sea instead of special sensitive fibers and equipment. Hopefully, Google's technology will be able to use common tools that are found in a large number of fiber optic systems in the world.

Why Fiber Optic Cable And How To Predict Earthquake?

Fiber optic cables connect distant continents with the ocean floor, and most of the international traffic on the Internet is done with these cables. Google also has its own submarine cable.

At the moment, their 15 fiber systems are spread over a total distance of 1 lakh 12 thousand kilometers. Cables are being used to connect, search, transmit and receive information around the world at the speed of light by connecting to global networks.

These cables are made using optical fiber, which transports information by traveling 204,109 kilometers per second.

This is why there is a digital signal processing system at the receiving end by which data distortions are corrected. One of the characteristics of light identified as part of optical transmission is the state of polarization (SOP). This is the situation that is showing hope in the plan to get an earthquake forecast.

This situation can change in response to mechanical disturbances, including cables, and identifying these disturbances, can enable us to detect the activity of earthquakes.

First attempt seven years ago

In 2013, Google began working on an earthquake forecasting system for the first time. At that time, instead of optical fiber under the sea, they conducted this test on land-based cables.

They focused on how SOP data could be used to better understand deviations from ground-based wire detection, but Google did not go to great lengths to detect seismic signals in the surrounding area.

The light of hope in scientific articles

In 2018, a team of 12 scientists from the United Kingdom, Italy, and Malta published a research report. The article mentions the initial success of detecting earthquakes by observing progressive changes through both land and sea using a short band ultrasound laser.

The team limited their experiments to a depth of 535 km on land, 96 km below sea level, and less than 200 m in shallow water. In a recent blog post published in Google Cloud, Google authorities said that this article made scientists interested in working on this issue anew.

In this context, they started thinking about how to detect earthquake data using fiber optic cable under the seafloor. In October of last year (2019), they came up with an idea to talk about the possibility of detecting earthquakes on the basis of spectral reflections. It is possible to get the expected results in the spectral analysis of Stokes' parameters to see the frequencies characteristic of earthquakes.

What do the experts say?

The Google team talked about their observations with Dr. Seismological Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology in the United States. With Zhan Gwen Zhan.

He confirmed the observations and made several suggestions for different types of earthquake wave travel time and the expected wavelength range of SOP travel.

Re-examination

In the months following the Jamaica earthquake, the Google team used the same method to detect multiple medium-sized earthquakes, both short and long-distance. On March 22, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake shook the eastern Pacific Ocean.

A Google submarine cable was able to detect earthquakes from 2,000 kilometers away. Six days later, on March 26, a magnitude 4.5 earthquake shook the coast of Valparaiso, Chile.

Google had a submarine cable within 30 kilometers of its origin. The cable is a clear but concise spike in SOP activity, and Google has been successful again.

There is still a long way to go for Earthquake Forecast

Valley Kamalov and Mattie Canton say it's just the beginning. There is still a long way to go. First, scientists need to better understand the flow of complex information generated by SOP observations.

Earthquake data is inherently complex - earthquakes of different types or magnitudes produce different waveforms that look very different from each other and the waveforms also change dramatically due to different conditions being affected.

To build a powerful seismic monitoring system, researchers need to have a good idea of ​​things like advanced mathematics and data analytics, where advanced computing systems like Google Cloud can also be helpful.

Over time, scientists will come to the conclusion that this is a work of machine learning, the best way to understand large data sets in a way that exceeds the capabilities of the human brain.

Google claims that they will be able to use this method as an alternative to existing seismic sensors, but as a source of complementary information to enable them to provide early warning for earthquakes and tsunamis. In the interest of social responsibility, Google is interested in involving all their submarine cables in this Earthquake Forecast, the blog post said.