Lloyd said:
That's interesting, but exactly what can i-Phones tell you about magnetic fields? How would an i-Phone user be able to read the data? If you had enough info spelled out, maybe they could be alerted worldwide when the times for earthquakes are most likely to occur. Didn't you say they occur mostly in the winter and at new or full moons?

iPhones sense the ambient field in 3 axes, so the exact azimuth & elevation of the force vector can be determined. The sensitivity appears to be to the nearest microtesla. (The Earth's field ranges from 25 to 65 microteslas.) The iPhone uses the force vector to determine the orientation of the unit, so that it can keep the text right-side-up even as the unit is rotated from portrait to landscape orientation. But the iPhone also allows programmatic access to the data. Thus an iPhone app can write the data to memory. In the data, we'll find EMPs from nearby lightning strikes, or other sorts of electrostatic discharges, such as Seneca Guns, tornadoes, volcanoes, and earthquake tremors. This will support theoretical advances. And if we can stream the data to a server in real time, we can send back warnings of impending distasters.