Google is Turning Android Phone into Seisometers

"But the highlight of today’s release is surely Google’s new worldwide earthquake detection system and the new earthquake alerting feature it is launching for California. With this, Google is essentially turning your Android phone into a seismometer to create what the company says is “the world’s largest earthquake detection network.

The company argues that smartphone accelerometers are sensitive enough to measure the P-waves that are the first waves to arrive after an earthquake. Whenever the phone thinks it has detected an earthquake, it will send that info to a central server, which then determines whether this was really an earthquake."

[link to techcrunch.com (secure)]