Twitter Helps Scientists Detect Earthquakes In Just 29 Seconds

After realising the speed at which the social network can report an earthquake, the U.S. government started using Twitter to detect significant tremours, pinpointing one in just 29 seconds.

Following the disastrous Sichuan earthquake in 2008 which killed more than 69,000 people and left 18,000 unaccounted for, it was noted that Twitter was faster at reporting the disaster than the U.S Geological Survey (USGS) - the government body in charge of tracking such events.

The organization’s National Earthquake Information Center uses 2,000 realtime earthquake sensors, with the majority based in the U.S.

That leaves a lot of the globe without sensors, but the survey team released that it could make use of the millions of people using twitter around the world.

A Twitter-based system now used by the USGS filters tweets for earthquake-related chatter.

Tweets with more than seven words are discounted as people tweeting about actual earthquakes tend to keep them very short.

The system also filters out tweets where people share links or mention the size of an earthquake, reasoning that they are unlikely to be giving first-hand reports.

This filtered stream has so far managed to trigger an alert using just 14 tweets, while the the 2014 earthquake in Napa, in which just one life was lost, was detected in just 29 seconds.

Image credit: Twitter