An Asia@Home workshop held at Academia Sinica recently brought together Taiwanese and international experts in earthquake science and in distributed computing to explore the use of ordinary consumer electronics – PCs, laptops and even smartphones – to build earthquake sensor networks in homes, schools and offices that can provide scientists with valuable data about future seismic events in Taiwan and SE Asia.

Aftershocks off the coast of Japan, more than magnitude 4, captured by Quake Catcher Network (Courtesy of Carl Christensen, Quake-Catcher Network project).

The recent tragic earthquake in Christchurch alone is reminder of the destructive forces that underlie that “Rim of Fire” extending through SE Asia as far as New Zealand.  A better understanding of how earthquakes will affect different regions requires more data and more computing power.

Both can be provided by volunteers at home, thanks to “volunteer computing”, which Academia Sinica has been pioneering in Taiwan through a series of Asia@Home workshops over the last three years.

At the workshop, Californian researchers David Anderson (UC Berkeley), Carl Christensen (right) (UC Berkeley) and Elizabeth Cochran (UC Riverside) presented results of their QuakeCatcher project that uses built-in or USB motion sensors on ordinary computers to form a new type of sensor network.

In future, even school children in Taiwan and neighbour countries could be part of a “citizen science” network that collects useful earthquake data.

The researchers also discussed with their Taiwanese and SE Asian counterparts how home computers could help calculate in advance the impact of earthquakes, helping authorities to better plan the use of their territory in many SE Asian countries.

Researchers in Taiwan are planning to use volunteer computing to visualise the motion of earthquakes after they occur.

They hope this will cut the time of creating ‘shake movies’ from a few hours to just minutes, providing valuable information to rescuers once an earthquake has occurred.

Shake movies play an important part in this effort. As animations, they show the ground motion of seismic events, shake movies simulate what you feel on the ground during an earthquake. They provide information as to where the strongest shaking has occurred, helping to ensure rescue efforts and resources are directed to where they are most needed.

Researchers create shake movies performing calculations on models of earthquakes as well as the earth’s structure. However the production process is computationally intensive, taking a few hours to create a movie on a large computing cluster.

To cut down on time taken to create these movies, the Institute of Earth Sciences researchers at Academia Sinica, Taipei, plan to use volunteers to donate idle computing cycles through a new initiative called called Shakemovie@home.

The initiative follows in the footsteps of other successful volunteer computing projects such as SETI@home, which searches for extra-terrestrial signals among radio telescope data.

In Shakemovie@Home volunteers’ computers will be used to retrieve essential functions needed to create new shake movies. Called Green’s functions, these elements are a key part of creating shake movies but can take a long time to calculate for every event.

However as Green’s functions depend only on the earth’s model, not on the earthquakes themselves researchers can compute, save and store them in advance, simply retrieving them as and when they are needed.

As the retrieval process is simple to carry out, Academia Sinica researchers plan to farm this out to volunteers who have signed up to Shakemovie@Home. Simply retrieving, rather than calculating Green’s function every time a new shake movie is made, they will cut time taken from a few hours to just minutes.

“Shake movies need to be both accurate and fast so that rescue efforts can be better directed and resources better allocated," says (right) Professor Li Zhao, Institute of Earth Sciences and Shakemovie@home leader.

"By distributing this task to volunteers and computers at home, we can get a better and faster way of making shake movies. Now we have shake movies in a few hours but with volunteer computing we could have it in minutes.”


The development of  the German Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System (GITEWS) launched in 2005 as a result of the devastating Tsunami of December 2004 was due primarily to the fact that there was no precautions  against a tsunami in the Indian Ocean. People were caught completely off guard by the deadly wave.

In November 2008, the system went into operation. Thereafter, GITEWS was optimised in  joint operation by Indonesian and German institutions. Since then, reliability of the early warning system has been successfully demonstrated numerous times.

"The early warning system is now completely an Indonesian responsibility," said (left) Professor Reinhard Huettl, chairman of the GFZ Centre for Geosciences (Helmholtz Association). "Germany continues to support the operation, in particular with the sustainable education and training of the warning centre operator BMKG."

What has been achieved, what happens next?
The technical structure of GITEWS and its mode of operation evaluated were appraised as exemplary for the Indian Ocean. Members of this commission included the heads of four operating worldwide tsunami warning centres, (right) Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC)  tsunami warning systems for Japan, Australia and India).

Particularly the extremely short warning time for Indonesia presented a challenge. "SeisComP3, the software tool developed by the GFZ, was designed for a very fast evaluation of earthquakes and has established itself as a standard for the nations around the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean", ascertains Prof. Huettl.

It is not just about the threat to Indonesia, the 2004 tsunami covered the entire Indian Ocean claiming some quarter of a million lives, 170 000 of which were in Indonesia.

Capacity Development
Besides the technical structure, scientists, disaster management, administration and populations have to be trained to know what to do in case of a strong earthquake and a tsunami and what preventive measures can be taken.

The recent earthquake tragedy in Japan demonstrates how prevention and training measures can minimise harm even during major disasters. For a sustainable success of the early warning system in Indonesia, this so-called capacity development will need to be developed further.

Specifically for GITEWS, the sequence of events beginning with a tsunami warning and ending with the evacuation of  a coastal area were acted out in three test regions (Padang, Sumatra, Cilacap, South Java; Kuta / Sanur, Bali).

In addition, Indonesia's seismological service BMKG  independently developed alarm plans for the entire country.

"Together with the newly established Indonesian National Board for Disaster Management BNPB, the procedures developed in the test regions will be carried nationwide in cooperation with LIPI, the Indonesian Academy of Sciences" adds (left) GITEWS project coordinator and GFZ scientist Dr. Jörn Lauterjung.

Reducing catastrophe
The Honshu-tsunami of 11 March 2011 in the Pacific shows that there cannot be a complete protection. But the dimensions of such a catastrophe can be reduced. This also applies to the Indian Ocean.

Immediately after the tsunami disaster of 26 December 2004, the Federal Government contracted the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, represented by the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, to develop and implement an early warning system for tsunamis in the Indian Ocean.

The funds in the amount of €55m stem largely from the contribution of the Federal Government to the aid for flood victims. The research project was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) conducted in cooperation with the Indonesian Ministry of Science and responsible authorities.

An early warning system cannot prevent a strong earthquake and a resulting tsunami. Deaths and major damage will continue to occur in the future. But an early warning system, including administrative measures and comprehensive capacity building, can reduce the impact.