Crowdsourcing for Earthquake Monitoring

“Technology is creating a new breed of scientist. I’m talking about citizen scientists – ordinary people and volunteers from all walks of life coming together to help monitor, and possibly mitigate, the next big earthquake through an innovative program called NetQuakes. A play off the popular company Netflix – a movie company that allows users to rent movies through the mail – NetQuakes allows ordinary people to volunteer as a kind of host “family” for one of the program’s many blue seismometers. This grassroots movement, an innovative effort between the USGS, the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN) and regular people, is forming an intricately advanced network of data that could help scientists, emergency experts and the general public become more aware of the dangers involved with earthquakes.” More