IvyMike

Learn to swim.

Picture of the recent california earthquake cluster. To this non-native Californian, it seems like we've had quite a few earthquakes recently, although the USGS tells me it's nothing to worry about.

When an earthquake hits, I usually load the usgs.gov site and bounce on "reload page" for the minute or two it takes before the site updates. I think the website could probably generate earthquake maps without a single seismograph just by correlating a spike of incoming browser ip addresses to geographic location and compensating for population density and time of day. (A small quake in a large town in the middle of the afternoon might generate more hits than a larger quake out in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.)

Now that I think about it, I guess what I'm suggesting is somewhat similar to "Community Internet Intensity Maps" (generated from data volunteered by website visitors); still, it would be interesting to analyze the website traffic logs after a significant quake. Maybe I can request the logs under the FOIA.

posted by IvyMike @ 6/17/2005 12:33:00 AM