Now, Google will use your phone to detect earthquakes soon

Google will use your phone's accelerometer to detect the movement. Stogaitis said "They're even sensitive enough to detect the P-wave, which is the first wave that comes out of an earthquake and is typically much less damaging than the S-wave which comes afterward." When your device senses something, it'll send a message to Google's earthquake detection server with some rough location information as to where it happened. The server will then gather data from other devices to corroborate and see if an earthquake is happening. UC Berkeley created an app in 2016 called MyShake that did something similar, and it appears Google has borrowed this idea, making it better integrated into the OS and more widespread.

The results of this work will for now be displayed when you look for "earthquake" or "earthquake near me" to show you if Android phones around you are reporting similar activity. Stogaitis added that the search results will also surface tips from "helpful, credible resources" on what to do after an earthquake. He also said the earthquake detection system, which he described as a "crowdsourced approach," was developed with seismology and disaster experts Dr. Richard Allen, Dr. Qingkai Kong and Dr. Lucy Jones.

Earthquake alerts are rolling out in California first, since there's already a great seismometer-based system in place." Stogaitis said the feature will roll out to more states and regions using the Android-based detection over the coming year.

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