Contrary to legend, animals do not have advance warning of an impending earthquake, but they are more sensitive to the very beginning of an earthquake than people are. Cryoseismologist Celeste Labedz explains the difference to us in excruciating detail, but then takes a left turn into a genius idea to harness this sensitivity and turn it into an alarm system for earthquakes. It involves equipping about two million cats in the Los Angeles area with Fitbits.
PURRS works like this: An earthquake occurs. Signals of cats going bananas start pouring in from near the epicenter, propagating outward with the seismic waves. When enough activity in the right distribution is detected, the system cat-egorizes it as a quake and sounds alarms.
— Celeste Labedz (@celestelabedz) November 10, 2019
Labedz describes the system and its benefits, but also admits it has drawbacks.
PURRS is a hard sell, not gonna lie. Upkeep would also be expensive and difficult; even just trying to cat-alog that much continuously-streaming data would be a monumental task. We would also have to turn it off during thunderstorms and on the 4th of July.
— Celeste Labedz (@celestelabedz) November 10, 2019
So that ain't gonna happen, but the cat puns in her thread are worth taking a look into the idea. You can read the full Twitter thread, or just peruse the highlights at Bored Panda.
(Image credit: Dwight Sipler)
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