Live
- Heavy rain halts trains in Japan, triggering landslide risks
- Rajasthan CM offers prayers at Shrinathji Temple
- Congress guarantees straining state finances: K’taka BJP
- Indian startups raise $12.2 bn, surpass 2023 figure with 2 months to go
- Iraqi militia claims four drone attacks on Israel
- Upset Delhi LG asks CM Atishi to speed up re-hiring of bus marshals
- Vandalism of Kali Puja Pandals is misleading & unsubstantiated: Kolkata Police
- Congress Delhi chief slams Atishi for neglecting bus marshals
- 3rd Test: Jadeja, Ashwin strike after Gill, Pant fifties as India take upper hand against NZ (Ld)
- Ricky Ponting backs Nathan McSweeney to open the batting with Khawaja in BGT
Sundar Pichai received an early warning of an earthquake hitting San Jose
Representative image
You receive alerts about heart rate, blood pressure and even car accident on your smartphone. But this time, many California residents, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, received an early warning of an earthquake hitting San Jose.
"You may have felt shaking," Google CEO Sundar Pichai and several California residents on Tuesday received this alert as a 4.8-magnitude earthquake hit the San Francisco Bay Area in the US. But what caught all the concentration and generated some stir on social networks was that many users received the alert even before the area in which they suffered the tremors and shakes of the seismic waves.
The mobile alert about the California earthquake was from an app called ShakeAlert, which was developed by Google. Sundar Pichai was one of the thousands of Android phone users who received the alert before the area was hit by tremors. He even shared a screenshot of the Android alert on Twitter and wrote, "The alert came just before, felt like a long one, hope everyone is ok."
Notably, the app does not predict natural disasters but instead analyzes data provided by state government agencies and third parties. The tectonic waves in the earth's crust are always in motion, and when they collide, they generate seismic waves. Sensors installed by the agencies record the data and send it to data processing centres. When recorded waves are high, and damage is expected, the ShakeAlert system reads the information and then sends a notification to alert people.
Interestingly, what happens with these apps is that they can record the information and transmit it to other places close to the speed of light, which is faster than the speed at which seismic waves travel. The result is that people are often given an earthquake warning seconds, sometimes even minutes, before the ground beneath their feet actually shakes.
"Light is faster than seismic waves... seismic waves travel at a speed of around 7km per second. This is a rough calculation, so there could be some plus or minus here and there. Now the distance between Delhi and Kolkata is 1,305 kilometers by air. Dividing this number gives us around 190 seconds. So the first tweets on Kolkata tremors came around 7:27 pm. The Delhi tweets came around 3 minutes later."
