AI is helping seismologists detect earthquakes they’d otherwise miss


Oklahoma never used to be known for its earthquakes. Before 2009, the state had roughly two quakes of magnitude three and above each year. (Magnitude three is when things shake on the shelf, but before houses start getting damaged.) In 2015, this tally rocketed to more than 900, though it’s calmed since, falling to 304 last year.

This sudden increase is thought to be caused by the disposal of wastewater by the state’s booming fracking industry, and it’s caught seismologists off-guard. As a historically quake-free area, Oklahoma doesn’t have enough equipment to detect and locate all of these quakes, making it hard to investigate their root cause. “There are no major faults in Oklahoma so it’s just not something we would expect,” Thibaut Perol, a deep learning researcher who’s worked on this problem, tells The Verge. “And to understand what’s happening, we need a big, big catalogue of earthquakes.”

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