An international team of researchers has unveiled revolutionary technology that can pinpoint the location of a landslide within 10 seconds. This discovery could radically change the approach to rescue operations, especially in remote and difficult-to-reach regions.
As Stefania Ursica, an expert from the Helmholtz Center for Geosciences (Germany), explains, the main problem with landslides is to quickly find the point of the disaster so that rescuers do not waste precious time searching. Previously, technology made it possible to determine the zone only with an accuracy of tens of kilometers. The new technique reduces this figure to several kilometers in a matter of seconds.
Conventional seismic stations that monitor earthquakes and volcanic eruptions also record signals from landslides. However, due to their complex structure, decrypting data used to take a long time.
New method analyzes five key parameters of seismic waves, which helps to highlight the moment of the onset of a landslide among other noises. The information is then processed by special algorithms that compare possible scenarios with real data.
Interestingly, these algorithms are inspired by animal behavior – for example, the spiral flight of birds of prey or the routes of elephants. This approach allows you to quickly narrow the search area to the most likely signal source.
The technology will not only speed up the work of rescuers, but will also help scientists better study landslides and other natural hazards in remote areas where satellite imagery is of little use.
As New Scientist reports, the developers plan to soon publish the results of the study and open access to the program code to everyone specialists. This will allow the technique to be implemented throughout the world and save thousands of lives.
Source: geoinfo.ru
Image generated by a neural network
