I'm still hoping someone makes an earthquake detection system where the data is just derived from people posting "Earthquake?" on Twitter/Threads/Facebook/Etc. Plot the geotagged tweets and it seems easy to get both the location and magnitude.
This reminded me about an old blogpost I read. This linked post may not be the one I remember, but it's close[1].
Back in 2011 there was an earthquake that New Yorkers felt. There were New Yorkers who read tweets of people further south on the East Coast posting about feeling an earthquake, and then the New Yorkers feeling the same earthquake a few seconds later.
There were some news outlets that picked up the story which you can find, but not exactly what OP was discussing.
The USGS created a system to do exactly this about 15 years ago. I’m not sure whether they’re still running it but at the EMSC, we've been running a similar system for many years to highlight earthquakes important to the public and improve our messaging. Twitter doesn’t give access to geotags anymore but we do manage to roughly estimate an earthquake’s location by analysis of the tweets. Estimating magnitude is much more difficult. Naturally there are some false positives but it works well overall.
We actually use the twitter detections to launch analyses of the seismic data in order to get confirmed results for events that aren’t reported yet [1] but there are some statistics for the twitter detections in the supplementary material of that article [2]. Basically, in 2016-2017 (wow, so long ago), we detected 893 earthquakes via twitter, with a median delay of 67s and a median separation from the published epicentre of 94km. Note that estimating earthquake epicentres is nontrivial anyway and so, for comparison, 10km accuracy would often be considered ok. So the twitter, I mean X, method isn’t optimal but it gets you down to the right region. Partly it’s because geocoding the tweets is inaccurate and partly it’s because people live clumped together in cities rather than smoothly spread over the surface of the earth.
When Twitter had an open API, some tech teams actually used it as an additional source for detecting incidents that internal monitoring missed (similar to how electricity grid operators watch TV to understand when demand surges are going to occur due to half time in sports games, etc).
Google has this. I remember recently feeling a minor earthquake, and googling it. The message that came up said that others had felt it too in my area, and then it showed up on official databases a few hours later.
The most useless detection system because you are either fine or buried under rubble at that point. Every real detection system attempts to catch the p-waves to warn users in real time ahead of shaking.
Certainly it's not going to compete with real time systems, but much like computing the speed of light using your microwave and a chocolate bar, it's just kind of neat to see how accurate such a system can be.
