In 2009, Twitter started to assist the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) staff in sending better, faster emergency alerts to the population.
What powered the cooperation is the users' contribution to the social media site. Regardless of where you are on Earth, American scientists are notified when a sufficiently large number of people tweet "earthquake."
The system, dubbed Tweet Emergency Dispatch, recognizes tweets in seven foreign languages, plus English. Twitter talked about the program in a blog post on Wednesday, Oct. 7. A talk between CNNMoney and U.S. government scientists confirmed the existence of the program.
Twitter automatically monitors and sorts through tweets from over 300 million active accounts. When lots of accounts from a specific geographical area start sending tweets that contain keywords referring to seismic movement, the government scientists receive a signal.
"It's not a revolutionary change in what we do, but it just gives us that extra minute to start on our response," a seismologist at USGS, Paul Earle, said.
One advantage of the Twitter monitoring is that people sometimes feel what broken sensors fail to. Also, in some places where there are no earthquake sensors at all, tweets can become life-saving warnings.
The USGS National Earthquake Information Center installed 2,000 devices to monitor the movement of the Earth's crust. The tricky part is that only half of them are on American territory, the rest dispersed throughout the world.
Last year, Californian sensors showed a mild, easily passable grade 5 earthquake. USGS reacted promptly and warned about the event on its website. Twitter data showed the contrary: there were no earthquake-related tweets from users and, it turns out, they were right. The earthquake never took place.
"The data stream from Twitter is totally independent. It's a secondary check," Earle declared.
The seismic activity-related data flowing in the social network allows researchers to improve the system. News headlines and mundane conversations about tectonic activity are now filtered out. The noteworthy messages are short and explicit because when the earthquake strikes, people will rarely have time to send out a long tweet.
One minute after the Chile earthquake in September, 14 users had tweeted about the event. The story appears in one of Twiiter's blog posts.
Fine-tuning requires an understanding of nuances, too. Certain words in different languages hint at the actual magnitude of the earthquake. For instance, Spanish speakers would tweet "terremoto" when referring to major quakes and "temblor" for minor ones.
The common purpose of both USGS and Twitter is to give people time to react in cases of tectonic emergency. The constant improvement of the shared program may save numerous lives in the future.
