Your tweets are being used by scientists to track earthquakes around the world

Oct08

by Sindy Cator on October 8, 2015 at 10:41 am

Twitter is one of the best places to keep on top of breaking news stories because of its massive user base and constant flow of traffic. And now all of that data is being harnessed to track earthquakes. Yes, in between those memes and opinions, there is genuinely useful data. The US Geological Survey (USGS) has been capitalizing on this, detecting tweets that mention earthquakes, even if they are in different languages. The organization only has 2,000 sensors for earthquakes, most of which are in the US. So Twitter’s data works to broaden its access to information about seismic activity…