AETA’s Earthquake Competition Has Officially Begun
The long-awaited earthquake forecasting competition has begun. After receiving over 500+ teams signed up to work on one of the world’s most ambitious projects. We may finally be able to forecast earthquakes similar to how we forecast the weather.
The AETA project has been an ongoing project for the last 12 years. Over the last 5 years, AETA has deployed over 300+ 3-part sensory systems within the Chinese province of Sichuan and has been collecting data over the past 5 years.
With an accumulation of over 40TB+ data, the AETA team are able to feed this into an algorithm that is able to successfully forecast earthquakes with a 70% accuracy rate, leading the world into a breakthrough in earthquake forecasting.
Throughout 2021, the ambition is to increase this accuracy rate to over 90% and begin deploying the sensors globally, completely minimizing the loss of life to zero.
What’s the difference between AETA’s forecasting model compared to alert systems?
An alert system is not a prediction-based system. An alert system needs an earthquake to occur in order to send out a warning to ‘users’. However, these warnings can only give less than 2 minutes of warning, which does not give enough time for people to find shelter or avert being affected by the earthquake.
Alert System (warning given AFTER an earthquake happens)
AETA’s solution, warning given several days BEFORE an earthquake happens
The AETA’s earthquake forecasting system operates by deploying 3-part sensory systems between 20 – 100KM apart, gathering around 91 varients of data streams, that is fed through an algorithm that is able to determine the chances of an earthquake’s occurrence, epicenter, and magnitude up to 7 days before it occurs.
How are AETA’s earthquake sensors deployed?
The AETA’s earthquake sensors are deployed across earthquake-affected areas in a chessboard-like style (see figure 1.0).
Figure 1.0
By deploying a more dense grid of sensors, the forecasting of the local region’s earthquakes is more accurate. Hence forecasting better results. Over time, the data gathered from these sensors will become fundamental to seismic expert’s research for understanding the planet we live on.
What does the future look like for AETA?
Eventually, our vision is to deploy these 3-part sensory systems across every earthquake-prone area of the planet, creating a global sensory network that will be used to save lives everywhere.
Furthermore, the earthquake forecasting system is the main goal, however, over time the sensors will be used in a vertical industry for forecasting other natural disasters such as landslides, volcanic activity, and tsunamis.
Mankind is now at the precipice of understanding the inner workings and structure of earthquake activity. If we are able to harness the advantages that big data offers and utilize it into a life-saving mechanism we can bring the world one step closer to a smarter safer environment.
