S Waves News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Put in place. >> reporter: scientists on the west coast are so encouraged how the technology worked in the major test of the japanese early warning system they are more encouraged than ever they will eventually get the system and follow japan's lead. millions of people were alerted by cell phone text mess and before the shaking actually started. for those closest to the epicenter the warning was 10 seconds. but people in tokyo had a fill minute to prepare. sensors detected the primary waves. they determine strength and location and send out a warning before the s waves or sheer waves hit. >> i...

The "p" waves come first. they come much, much faster. when the sensors start detecting this, they know the "s" waves are going to follow. they do the wavy thing and that does all of the damage. that's how they know. they've got sensors all over the place, like seismographs, similar to what we have in the u.s. and they have dart system on the ocean floor so you can start to detect some of that as well. as soon as a warning is issued they're alerted by television, radio, smartphone, if they have an app for that, and then also factories are alerted and production is halted so that things aren't ...

Many, many different ways. first of all, it's automated so that really helps. it helps give advance warning. this kind of situation, we can't really predict earthquakes or tsunamis until after the earthquake happenses, ingshappe one of the best systems, one of the top if not the top. this is the parliament from tokyo and this box here shows you the warning, that the earthquake is coming. take notice. see these guys looking up? it's literally within a couple of seconds that they had between the time that the warning was issued and the time that they started to feel things and notice the differe...

Prevent any additional breaking or anything like that going on. and bullet trains are literally stopped in their tracks. where they are. whether out in the open country or maybe even a tunnel. they will stop those bullet trains, because they think that will be a safer situation if that thing kept on going. how does it work? basically there's millions and thousands of little sensors all over the place in japan. and they're also on ocean floor and they detect any kind of movement in the earth's crust. now when an earthquake occurs, there are two different types of waves, p waves and s waves. the...

Warning. there is always the ability to have some short-term warning, because there are p waves and s waves. so, the primary waves would go out from the earthquake at a faster speed. in fact, they travel about twice as fast as the s waves, which create the great damage. and therefore, if you are at a distance away from where the epicenter of the earthquake is, you will get several seconds to maybe up to a minute warning because the p waves will be ahead of the s waves by that amount of time. in fact, some of the shinkansen trains, the bullet trains, are equipped with instrumentation that will ...