Borasky Research Journal Google+ Page I’ve just learned that the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has started a project to enhance detection of earthquakes using Twitter! The project is called U.S. Geological Survey Twitter Earthquake Detector (USGSTed). The web site is http://recovery.doi.gov/press/us-geological-survey-twitter-earthquake-detector-ted/, and the Twitter feed is @USGSted.
According to the site, “Social Internet technologies are providing the general public with anecdotal earthquake hazard information before scientific information has been published from authoritative sources. People local to an event are able to publish information via these technologies within seconds of their occurrence. In contrast, depending on the location of the earthquake, scientific alerts can take between 2 to 20 minutes.”
As you probably recall, I’ve been working with some of the projects that arose after the Haiti earthquake in January. I don’t have much data from that earthquake, but I do have data from the Chile quake and today’s Taiwan quake.
To give you an idea of how rapidly Twitter responds to an earthquake, the Chile earthquake occurred Saturday, February 27, 2010 at 06:34:14 UTC. In my data collected after the quake, using GeoTweetHistory.pl, the first tweet about the earthquake has the time stamp 06:34:37 UTC. That’s right, the first tweet was sent only 23 seconds after the quake! That first tweet reads simply, “TEMBLOR”.
If you’d like to look at the data from today’s Taiwan earthquake, I’ve uploaded the data file from GeoTweetHistory.pl to http://github.com/znmeb/GeoTweetHistory/blob/master/taiwan_quake.zip. The earthquake occurred Thursday, March 04, 2010 at 00:18:52 UTC.
I don’t read Chinese, so I can’t tell when the first tweet about the earthquake was. If you can read Chinese and would like to help, download the file, uncompress it and open it in a spreadsheet. The collected tweets are displayed with the newest tweet first. You should see tweets about the earthquake shortly after “2010-03-04 00:18:53 +0000″. Let me know on Twitter or in the comments here on the blog. Thanks!
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@znmeb this is a must for Chile, we should include Tsunami. Hopefully our FEMA (ONEMI) would consider this emerging tools @matias_carrozzi
@favilar are you on the Crisis Mappers’ list? They were looking for people in Pittsburgh – or is that you that was looking?
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RT @znmeb: USGS Working On Earthquake Detection Via Twitter! | Borasky Research Journal http://meb.tw/bu1R3h
RT @znmeb: USGS Working On Earthquake Detection Via Twitter! | Borasky Research Journal http://meb.tw/bu1R3h
USGS Working On Earthquake Detection Via Twitter! | Borasky Research Journal http://meb.tw/bu1R3h
USGS Working On Earthquake Detection Via Twitter! | Borasky Research Journal http://borasky-research.net/2010/03/03/u...
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RT @znmeb: USGS Working On Earthquake Detection Via Twitter! | Borasky Research Journal http://borasky-research.net/2010/03/03/u...
RT @znmeb: USGS Working On Earthquake Detection Via Twitter! | Borasky Research Journal http://borasky-research.net/2010/03/03/u...
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