Crowdsourcing earthquake activity

Ars Technica : New technologies are enabling crowdsourcing in a number of scientific disciplines—most recently, seismology. After the 23 August 2011 earthquake on the US East Coast, a video rendering of the seismic waves’ travel was created by plotting the posted Twitter messages that contained the word “earthquake.” Richard Allen, a seismologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has published a paper in Science that discusses the possibilities and the limitations of such crowdsourcing of earthquake information. Besides Twitter, the US Geological Survey seeks the public’s input via its Did You Feel It? website, UC Berkeley has developed an iShake app that makes use of cell phones’ internal accelerometers, and Caltech offers to place seismometers in participants’ homes through its Community Seismic Network project. Crowdsourcing earthquake information is not a new idea: Seismologists have long used first-person reports, particularly for historic quakes that lack high-quality seismographic measurements, writes Scott Johnson for Ars Technica.