Share The magnitude 7.8 Kaikōura earthquake in 2016 ripped up highways and hillsides on New Zealand’s South Island. REUTERS/Anthony Phelps New Google effort uses cellphones to detect earthquakes Apr. 28, 2021 , 1:00 PM Google is getting further into the business of saving lives. Today, the internet giant announced that users of its Android phones in New Zealand and Greece will receive warnings of damaging earthquakes about to strike their locations. And those earthquakes will be detected not by the usual seismometers, but by the phones themselves. Earthquakes are a well-known threat in both countries. In New Zealand, the Pacific Plate collides with the Australian Plate and their grinding regularly causes large quakes, including a 2011 shock in Christchurch that killed nearly 200 people. Greece is spread across three tectonic plates, with damaging quakes a near-annual occurrence. But neither country has deployed an operational warning system. That created an opportunity to make a difference, says Marc Stogaitis, the project’s lead engineer at Google. “We have two big problems we want to solve: detecting earthquakes as quickly as possible and sending out alerts as quickly as possible.”