Aju Business Daily

SEOUL -- Mobile phone base stations set up by SK Telecom will be used to create a seismic monitoring network installed with sensors that would interwork with the earthquake observation system of South Korea's national meteorological service to issue early warnings.

SK Telecom will work with the Korea Meteorological Administration and Kyungpook National University to create a network of earthquake monitoring devices installed on mobile phone base stations. Currently, the weather agency collects earthquake data from 338 observatories to monitor the movement of the earth's plates and issue earthquake alerts within 25 seconds of detection.

SK Telecom (SKT) said that its earthquake monitoring device is about the size of an adult's palm and is capable of collecting vibrations of up to 100 shakes per second. It can differentiate an ordinary vibration caused by ordinary situations from an actual earthquake to improve the precision of the monitoring device.

The earthquake monitoring device was demonstrated in Hwaseong some 45 kilometers (27 miles) south of Seoul on July 9 to detect and analyze an artificial earthquake measuring 6.0 on the Richter scale. SKT will deploy earthquake monitoring devices to base stations and other facilities including schools and police stations and by the end of this year to create a nationwide detection network.

Data including vibrations and air pressure collected by SKT's earthquake monitoring devices will be sent to the weather agency for analysis and research. With SKT's information, weathermen can provide earthquake-related information services and reduce the time to issue alerts.

An earthquake with a magnitude of up to 5.8 hit Gyeongju about 280 kilometers southeast of Seoul in 2016, followed by an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.4 in the southeastern port city of Pohang a year later. The tremors led residents to purchase survival bags containing food, emergency equipment.
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