Earthquakes are scary. They come with no warning and can cause massive destruction in a matter of seconds. And to some people, artificial intelligence can also be scary. But using one to help predict the other could be an amazing help in saving lives in the near future. 

For earthquakes big or small, sensors around the globe detect the tremors and relay that information to researchers, who quickly analyze the observations and issue alerts.

Now artificial intelligence is poised to make almost everything about earthquake research much faster — and to rewrite researchers’ very understanding of how earthquakes happen.

By using a subfield of AI called machine learning, some scientists are identifying up to millions of tiny, previously unseen earthquakes in data gathered from seismically active places. These new and improved databases are helping researchers to better understand the geological faults along which quakes happen, and can help to illuminate the risks of future quakes. Some scientists are even using machine learning to improve their forecasts of how many aftershocks may rattle a location that has just experienced a large and damaging earthquake.

More broadly, researchers hope that machine learning, with its ability to crunch through huge amounts of information and learn from the patterns within, will reveal fresh insights into some of the biggest mysteries about earthquakes, including how a quake unfolds in its first devastating seconds.