Quake-Catcher Network

Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) was a Stanford-born experiment that asked a startling question: can we build a real-time global earthquake detector out of the accelerometers in volunteers' laptops? Modern laptops have small accelerometers built in — originally for hard-drive park-on-fall protection — that are surprisingly sensitive. Sample them, ship the data over the Internet, and a sufficiently dense network of laptops becomes a planet-scale seismograph.

QCN was launched in 2008 by Elizabeth Cochran (then at UC Riverside) and Jesse Lawrence (Stanford), built on the BOINC platform that SETI@home had popularized. Volunteers ran the QCN client, which processed accelerometer data continuously and reported anomalies back. For volunteers without a built-in sensor, the project sold low-cost USB accelerometers (Onavi, JoyWarrior, MotionNode) for ~$50, which dramatically improved sensitivity.

The project produced real seismology, not just press releases. QCN deployments captured earthquakes in California, Chile, New Zealand, and Haiti; the data fed peer-reviewed papers in Seismological Research Letters and elsewhere on rapid earthquake detection, magnitude estimation, and ShakeMap-style hazard products. Elizabeth Cochran was awarded a US Presidential Early Career Award in 2011 in large part for founding QCN.

Stewardship moved from Stanford to Caltech, then in 2016 to the Southern California Earthquake Center and the IRIS consortium. After that, activity dwindled; the BOINC server stopped accepting new tasks around 2018–2020 and the project is effectively shut today. But QCN's design pattern — volunteer compute fused with consumer-grade sensors — directly inspired Radioactive@Home and points toward a whole class of citizen-sensor projects yet to be built.