Publish at April 13 2009 Updated January 22 2024
The story of the Euro-Mediterranean Seismological Centre 's (EMSC) Internet service paints a highly original picture.
Shortly after its website went online, the site's administrators quickly realized that the peaks in traffic to their site had all the characteristics of those to their seismographs.
By investing a little attention and computer development, they designed a software program that associates early traffic peaks with the geographical areas of origin of Internet users and, in less than five minutes (soon to be two), accurately determines the origin and intensity of the earthquake.
This performance is impossible to achieve with seismographs, since they have to wait for the delayed reception of p- and s-waves, which do not travel at the same speed, to find out the approximate distance of an earthquake - a delay of several minutes - then cross-check this data with other distant seismographs and, by triangulation, determine the place of origin, which takes even longer.
Better still, Internet users can provide qualitative information and even photos in their comments, so that the authorities can be alerted with reliable information.
The worst-case scenario would be a large number of regional accesses, but none from the affected area, which no longer has direct access.
The beauty of the service is that, at any time of the day or night, there are always Internet users connected, and when the earth shakes, what they were doing suddenly loses a lot of importance, and it's only a matter of seconds before they type "earthquake" into a search engine and end up on the reference site...
So the image created by Internet users offers better quality than that of seismographs. Seismographs are like pixels in the sensors of digital cameras. The key is to determine the exact position of the sensors in order to create a coherent image.
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