The West Coast of the United States has a very mature seismic network, as well as a large GPS infrastructure with hundreds of monitoring stations. But because they are two different systems many of them are not integrated. Geodesist Yehuda Bock of the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography is merging the technologies to quickly and accurately address public safety threats, like earthquakes, tsunamis and floods.

"What we’re doing is taking the existing GPS infrastructure and then plugging in low cost seismic sensors so that we can now have a network of co-located instruments, co-located sensors."

In the case of earthquakes, in the first few seconds of information, Bock says they can get a pretty good estimate of what the magnitude of the earthquake is going to be.

"We can then start a sequence of response, starting with early warning, then what areas are being affected and if there is a high probability of a tsunami event, to provide a tsunami forecast of what can be expected."