Google’s parent company Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai today revealed the next big project that could help the world to form a ‘safer’ place.
Natural disasters like floods or earthquakes come without any serious prior warning as such. Google and its CEO Sundar Pichai is exactly have something to tell us about.
Google recently conducted an experiment using its subsea fiber optic cables, which showed that it could be useful for earthquake and tsunami warning systems.
Google first started working on this in 2013 but it was only in 2019 that Google conducted its first experiment. Initially, there was no state of polarisation (SOP) changes that could detect an earthquake. “Then, on January 28, 2020, we detected a magnitude 7.7 earthquake off of Jamaica—1500 km away from the closest point of one of our cables!,” Google further said in the blog post. The state of polarisation continued to show a sole for five minutes after the earthquake took place. This, as per Google, correlated to the travel time of the seismic wave from Jamaica to the cable, and the duration of the spike was about 10 minutes.
Since then Google has been able to detect moderate-sized earthquakes in Mexico and Chile.
“We’re excited by the early success of detecting seismic events with subsea cables, which can improve our ability to observe both the Earth’s structure and earthquake dynamics,” noted the company in the blog post. However, this is just the beginning, according to the tech giant. The blog post further noted, “to create a robust earthquake monitoring system, researchers need advanced mathematics and data analytics, where advanced computing systems like Google Cloud can be instrumental.”
