US Geological Survey: Tectonic Shifts, Tweets, & Tactical Data Analysis

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) operates a real-time system that detects earthquakes using only tweets. The main benefit of the tweet-based detections is speed, with most detections occurring between 20 and 120 seconds after the origin time. This timeframe is significantly faster than seismically-derived detections in poorly instrumented regions of the world. This talk will present a technical overview of the Elasticsearch and Kibana-based system and describe the potential for rapid characterization of earthquake damage via the added real-time search and visualization tools combined with analysis of the 32 million 'earthquake' tweets the system has so far amassed.