The Twitter Earthquake Detection project was described at the American Geophysical Union's meeting. The “tweetering” spikes just after an earthquake.
They are hoping that using the social networking phenomenon will help the scientists and the emergency response teams to get information a little quicker. The spikes of traffic on the site greatly increases after an earthquake and will maybe assist to determine the severity of a quake slightly faster to better enable the emergency teams to make an assessment. It is speed over accuracy. For more information please see the BBC page “OMG Did you just feel that quake?”
However, you will be glad to hear that this monitoring of the “twitter” traffic is there to supplement tried and tested scientific reporting.
The Icelandic Meterological office publish the earthquake activity in Iceland on a regular basis and you can access this whenever you want to see the latest seismic charts. Or even better - why not visit Iceland on one of our education trips to see the active earth in motion.
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