Twitter project helps USGS track earthquakes
Source: Joe Nelson
U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Paul Earle and computer scientist Michelle Guy are taking social media to a new level, using Twitter to help detect earthquakes in real time as they are felt across the globe.
Although the two have spent more than five years on the project, the efforts of Earle and Guy recently hit the media spotlight as millions of people worldwide are getting ready Thursday to participate in the annual Great ShakeOut, a series of earthquake drills to prepare the public for a 7.8- magnitude temblor.
In California, 10.4 million people are registered to take part, with roughly 70 percent ― 6.9 million people ― residing in Southern California, according to the ShakeOut website.
Using Twitter’s Public API (application programming interface), Earl and Guy created a system for filtering tweets of no more than seven words from people who felt or may have felt earthquakes. Through experimentation, the two realized those tweeting about actual earthquakes tended to be less wordy. The stream of filtered tweets ultimately trigger an e-mail alert.
“The advent of social media and ability to instantly collect information from individuals all over the world is something we found interesting,” Earle said. “What we’re hoping to do with this is speed up detection of (earthquakes) and find earthquakes in areas where we don’t have seismometers.”
Earle and Guy are based at the U.S. Geological Survey National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado.
“What social media allows you to do is get coverage in places you don’t get it and in regions where you don’t have instrumentation,” said Earle. “We prefer a quantitative measurement, but these qualitative data of what people experience is useful.”
And tweets travel faster to the public than seismic energy travels through the Earth to seismometers, Guy said.
“So this gives us a very rapid heads up of some possible shaking event happening in regions of the world where we don’t have a lot of seismometers,” Guy said.
Guy and Earle recently began using Twitter open-source software, Elasticsearch and Kibana, to better visualize and analyze their collected data.
“It’s a very low-cost system compared to the cost of installing and maintaining seismometers,” Guy said. “It will never replace (seismometers), but it supplements.”
The biggest challenge the project has presented thus far, Guy said, is determining the location of earthquakes. Many occur in the ocean or in remote or unpopulated areas, making detection more difficult.
“Determining the location of earthquakes, as this information is coming in, is the weakest point in the system,” Guy said. “The information isn’t always there, and we can only come up with where people are talking about it.”
The next step for Earl and Guy is planting the tweet-based detections into a seismic algorithm system for processing, which may be able to accelerate e-mail alerts.
“We don’t know if it will work or not,” Guy said,
“Combining the qualitative with the quantitative seismic data, we’re just starting to investigate that,” Earle said.
Joan Fryxell, a professor of geology at Cal State San Bernardino, said Earle’s and Guy’s system could be a great way to engage the public in spreading the word about earthquakes.
“They become, instead of an observer of the process, a part of the process,” Fryxell said. “And people’s motivation goes way up when they become a part of the process.”
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