USGS Using Twitter Data To Track Earthquakes Around The World
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) -- The next time you feel what might be an earthquake, and post to Twitter, you could be helping the USGS track seismic events.
Hundreds of millions of Twitter users around the globe far outnumber the roughly 2,000 sensors used by the USGS to track earthquakes for the National Earthquake Information Center.
A Twitter blog lays explains that USGS staffers teamed up with a software developer to analyze how that Twitter data could be used to help detect earthquakes felt by humans by filtering the tweets, concluding that people experiencing earthquakes "aren't very chatty."
The USGS even monitors Twitter for earthquakes in multiple languages, using words as clues to quake locations, and magnitudes.
