- The tweets above may not look like unusual, but they're actually at the forefront of how earthquakes are monitored and how alerts are sent out when an earthquake occurs.
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said that Twitter actually alerted the service to the magnitude 7.6 earthquake in the Philippines today.
The USGS has a Tweet Earthquake Dispatch service that monitors tweets in several languages, looking for the word earthquake, and then it includes those figures in the alert tweets that the agency sends out. In the second tweet above, the service measured 352 #quake tweets/minute in area.
- “In some cases, it gives us a heads up that it happened before it can be detected by a seismic wave,” Paul Earle, a USGS seismologist told Bloomberg. Earle also said that Twitter monitoring works best in remote places where the USGS doesn't have as many instruments to measure seismic activity.
Earle did admit sometimes the service can be fooled, if people are posting about songs with "Earthquake" in the title.
Below are some of the Tweets and pictures we found of people who experienced the earthquake in the Philippines.