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Scientists Use Twitter to Collect Real-Time Data on Earthquakes

by Caleb Johnson on January 9, 2010 at 02:50 PM

Seeking to disseminate information more quickly, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is turning to Twitter for a little help. According to Ecopolitology, a group of seismologists led by Dr. Paul Earle recently created an application, dubbed the Twitter Earthquake Detection Project, that monitors tweets for earthquake-related keywords. The idea grew from the deluge of tweets that quickly hit the site during a 2008 California quake. After confirming the reported activity, seismologists send an e-mail alert that lists the earthquake's magnitude, location, and depth below the surface, as well as the number and location of the tweets.

While this project could help track quakes outside the reach of a seismograph, it does have limitations. Typically, a person won't include much hard data in a tweet. Also, there are plenty of tweets that casually use earthquake terms and would need to be filtered out. All that being said, if used in tandem with other hard scientific data, the Twitter Earthquake Detection Project could become a valuable resource. There really is no faster way to collect and send information. And that's not to mention the project's potential as an emergency communication tool.

It's good to see people finding more legitimate uses for the social networking site. For a while, it seemed like Twitter was just good for spam. [From: Ecopolitology]

Tags: data, earthquake, science, socialnetworking, twitter, web

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