A team of scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory is working on a solution for predicting natural disasters, starting with earthquakes and tsunamis. To achieve this, they have developed a deep-learning model able to pick up on the gravity waves generated by an earthquake and thus predict the risk of an ensuing tsunami. 

“Our model unlocks real-time estimation of earthquake magnitude, using data routinely treated as noise, and can immediately be transformative for tsunami early warning,” said Bertrand Rouet-Leduc, a scientist in Los Alamos’ Geophysics group.

Rapid and reliable magnitude estimation for large earthquakes is crucial to mitigate the risks associated with strong shaking and tsunamis.

Currently, systems used to detect earthquakes are based on seismic waves, which makes them unable to rapidly estimate the size of large earthquakes. Since the estimations are based on the shaking produced by an earthquake as it happens, they cannot prevent...