Volunteer seismologists from among the public have been enlisted to help advance the knowledge and understanding of earthquakes in a university program that uses cloud computing.
In an article published by online journal GeoScienceWorld, academics from Academia Sinica and National Taiwan Normal University said that “volunteers can contribute to data collection, analysis and reporting, and have the potential to improve” emergency responses to earthquakes and tsunamis.
“The Citizen Seismologists in Taiwan Project is designed to elevate the quality of earthquake science education by incorporating earthquake and tsunami stories and educational earthquake games into traditional school curricula,” the article said.
The paper said the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued a tsunami bulletin 15 minutes after the Sumatra earthquake in 2004. Although the bulletin said there was no threa, a tsunami hit Aceh, Indonesia, claiming about 100,000 lives.
This is because the quake’s magnitude was underestimated, the paper said.
Swift and precise determination of an earthquake’s magnitude is the key to predicting a tsunami, issuing warnings and preventing the loss of life, it said.
Project leader Kate Huihsuan Chen (陳卉瑄) told the Taipei Times on Wednesday that the failure of the tsunami warning system was mostly due to an underestimation of earthquake magnitude shortly after the event.
“Quickly determining the magnitude of an earthquake that has a magnitude of more than eight is always a difficult job. The reason is that quick detection relies on the peak amplitude of seismic measurements. However, they miss how long the energy output lasts, therefore for very big events, you need to wait for all the energy to be released in order to get the right earthquake magnitude.”
The short distance from tsunami source to populated, low-lying coasts, the lack of warning systems, vulnerable infrastructure and minimal disaster preparedness were also factors, said Chen, who is an associate professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at National Taiwan Normal University.
“The project aims to build a cloud-based service incorporating an earthquake school where teachers can easily teach their students about earthquakes and children can learn about earthquakes in a fun environment,” the article said, where the “school” is online.
“To better prepare people for natural disasters, it is important to understand how previous disasters have occurred, why lives were lost and what lessons have been learned,” it said, adding that such understanding would allow the attitude of the public to change from training to learning for natural disaster preparedness.
Chen said that a denser seismic network built through the project would allow people to develop their own questions and ideas about what controls shaking during a quake.
“They generally never get a chance to see waveforms [from a seismometer] or understand the story behind the data,” she said. “If they can own the data recorded at home with user-friendly tools that allow them to see the wave, they might be curious about what the seismic record ... tells [them].”
Taiwan is one of the countries most vulnerable to natural hazards, with 73 percent of its land area and population exposed to more than three types of natural hazards, the report said.
The paper described how students could perform P-wave and S-wave picking and measure seismic intensity in a near-real-time competition.
P-waves are seismic waves that travel in three dimensions through the ground and arrive first after a quake, while S-waves, or shear waves, are responsible for up-and-down shaking.
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