San Francisco, Dec 16 (THAINDIAN NEWS) Scientists at the United States Geological Survey are sure moving with the times. They have noticed that users of the social networking and micro blogging site Twitter in the seismically active areas of the world were very fast to note and report any temblors and movements of the Earth that they felt. “There were reports that people on Twitter were beating the USGS” at getting out alerts of earthquake activity, said USGS scientist Paul Earle.

USGS scientists learnt of this feature some time earlier in the year and then they studied the phenomenon, if they could put it to good and productive use too. Then they presented the findings at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, yesterday.

Earle and his colleagues have begun monitoring the site and then they come to learn about new earthquakes by searching with keywords such as earthquake in the 140 character tweets, which are send out by the users of Twitter. They start searching for the tweets after a seismometer somewhere in the world tells about the rupture of an earthquake. Both the tweets themselves as well as the locations of the twitterers can tell scientists something, for example, how soon temblors were felt and how far away from an earthquake’s epicenter they extended.

After one minor temblor in southern California, the first tweet from the area that noted the shaking (and simply read “earthquake!”) came just 13 seconds after seismometers registered the quake. “People like to tweet after earthquakes,” USGS seismologist Paul Earle said Monday during an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.