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.
