Earthquake early warning's (EEW) fundamental promise is that earthquakes can be rapidly detected so that people and systems can be alerted to take protective action before shaking arrives at their location (Heaton, 1985). In order to maximize warning time and to minimize the population not receiving sufficient warning, EEW requires a dense sensor network so that earthquakes can be detected closest to wherever they may nucleate. The locations where earthquakes nucleate and where people reside, however, might be quite removed from one another. This requirement for dense sensor networks combined with the high cost of expensive scientific-grade sensors currently limits EEW systems to wealthy countries (Allen & Melgar, 2019). Alternatively, a new generation of low-cost accelerometer and geodetic sensors (Cochran, 2018) could make EEW generally accessible. In particular, utilizing smartphones, including via crowd-sourcing, is a potentially transformative way to provide EEW (
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.