How to detect earthquakes on Twitter?

ByKeri J

On Twitter in 2008Sichuan EarthquakeAfter the occurrence, the tweets about the earthquake are on the increase, users living in the area after the earthquake occurred immediately murmuring the earthquake information,Geological SurveyIt seems that earthquake information gathers faster than USGS. Paying attention to the point that information can be gathered instantly, technology that tracks an earthquake using Twitter is published on the Twitter official blog.

How the USGS uses Twitter data to track earthquakes | Twitter Blogs
https://blog.twitter.com/2015/usgs-twitter-data-earthquake-detection

In the US, the earthquake information center (NEIC) of the USGS has installed more than 2000 seismic observation machines, but it can not cover the whole vast land area, inevitably there are places where there are no observation instruments That's right. Together with Twitter management staff and USGS, an attempt was made to gather tweets by hundreds of Twitter users in the United States and to identify areas where the earthquake occurred. Analyzing the tweets about the earthquake, it seems that it turned out that people tended to post short texts such as "earthquake?" Immediately after the earthquake occurred.

In USGS, Tweet API is used to extract tweets including seven words such as "earthquake" and "terremoto" meaning an earthquake in Spanish and devised a method to detect events in chronological order in the same way as existing earthquake detection It was. With this new method, the earthquake that occurred in Chile in September 2015 seems to have succeeded in gathering information in only 1 minute and 20 seconds since the influence of shaking to the south part of the United States. In addition, it was successful at sending the earthquake warning information mail when 14 tweets related to earthquakes gathered.


This technology also supports languages ​​other than English, it is also possible to detect earthquakes that occurred in Chile by detecting Spanish tweets as follows, for example.


The earthquake observer installed by NEIC also contains earthquake information that does not directly affect the lives of people, such as those occurring on the ocean floor or in areas where people do not live, but with the technology developed this time, people It is the point that we can collect earthquake information that occurred in the area where I live quickly. It occurred in California in August 2014earthquakeIn the case of that, many users murmured the earthquake information, the USGS succeeded in gathering earthquake information in only 29 seconds.

In the future, USGS will combine existing seismic observation system and new technology utilizing Twitter to discover the malfunction of the seismic observation device, make it possible to transmit alert information faster when an earthquake occurs, research It is planned to advance.