Saturday 27 February 2010

Quick post

Been watching twitter again, really interesting (and somewhat distressing) to watch the information about this earthquake/tsunami event throughout the southern pacific. Twitter continues to be a unique source, or at least aggregation, of information as the day continues.

See here and here for some amazing data/graphs all of the science stations and monitoring equipment have managed to piece together. Here is the original report which hit the net early this morning and soon got around, still being re-tweeted 12 hours later.

Though the source of many losses of life - and I know all our thoughts are with those who now have to take account of losses and begin the next stages of clear up and overcoming the emotional effects of it all - this is an example of technology being a huge help to the world. That data can be collected and dispersed so quickly is amazing, and if the tsunami does turn out to be significant, the warning of over 24 hours in some cases is invaluable.

I continue to be amazed that scientists are keeping careful logs of sea levels and seismic activity in places that are essentially inaccessible. Hundreds or even thousands of miles out to sea are buoys placed to measure this kind of data, and who knows how many man hours are spent collating it all. And at what expense. Whoever's funding this stuff needs to be thanked and have funding thrown at them to make sure it continues. (assuming of course that extra money solves any problem..)

Current tsunami data kept updated here.

Be safe out there.

No comments:

Post a Comment