{"id":203103,"date":"2025-10-10T14:13:06","date_gmt":"2025-10-10T14:13:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/203103\/"},"modified":"2025-10-10T14:13:06","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T14:13:06","slug":"like-putting-on-glasses-for-the-first-time-how-ai-improves-earthquake-detection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/203103\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cLike putting on glasses for the first time\u201d\u2014how AI improves earthquake detection"},"content":{"rendered":"

On January 1, 2008, at 1:59 am in Calipatria, California, an earthquake happened. You haven\u2019t heard of this earthquake; even if you had been living in Calipatria, you wouldn\u2019t have felt anything. It was magnitude -0.53, about the same amount of shaking as a truck passing by. Still, this earthquake is notable, not because it was large but because it was small\u2014and yet we know about it.<\/p>\n

Over the past seven years, AI tools based on computer imaging have almost completely automated one of the fundamental tasks of seismology: detecting earthquakes. What used to be the task of human analysts\u2014and later, simpler computer programs\u2014can now be done automatically and quickly by machine-learning tools.<\/p>\n

These machine-learning tools can detect smaller earthquakes than human analysts, especially in noisy environments like cities. Earthquakes give valuable information about the composition of the Earth and what hazards might occur in the future.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the best-case scenario, when you adopt these new techniques, even on the same old data, it\u2019s kind of like putting on glasses for the first time, and you can see the leaves on the trees,\u201d said Kyle Bradley, co-author of the\u00a0Earthquake Insights<\/a> newsletter.<\/p>\n

I talked with several earthquake scientists, and they all agreed that machine-learning methods have replaced humans for the better in these specific tasks.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really remarkable,\u201d Judith Hubbard, a Cornell University professor and Bradley\u2019s co-author, told me.<\/p>\n

Less certain is what comes next. Earthquake detection is a fundamental part of seismology, but there are many other data processing tasks that have yet to be disrupted. The biggest potential impacts, all the way to earthquake forecasting, haven\u2019t materialized yet.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt really was a revolution,\u201d said Joe Byrnes, a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. \u201cBut the revolution is ongoing.\u201d<\/p>\n

When an earthquake happens in one place, the shaking passes through the ground, similar to how sound waves pass through the air. In both cases, it\u2019s possible to draw inferences about the materials the waves pass through.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On January 1, 2008, at 1:59 am in Calipatria, California, an earthquake happened. You haven\u2019t heard of this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":203104,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-203103","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203103\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/203104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}