Characterization of the 2011 Mineral, Virginia, Earthquake Effects and Epicenter from Website Traffic Analysis

Abstract

This paper presents an after‐the‐fact characterization of the 2011 M 5.8 Mineral, Virginia, earthquake’s epicenter and effects from the traffic observed on the European–Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) Website within minutes of its occurrence. This approach, named flash sourcing (Bossu et al. , 2011b), is based on the real‐time detection and processing of traffic surges observed on the EMSC Website after widely felt earthquakes (Bossu et al. , 2008). Such surges are common on rapid earthquake information websites such as that of the EMSC (Wald and Schwarz, 2000; Schwarz, 2004). They are generally assumed to be caused by the natural convergence of eyewitnesses who rush to the Internet to investigate the cause of the shaking that they have just felt (Bossu et al. , 2007, 2011a). Based on this assumption and on the location of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of website visitors, flash sourcing automatically detects such felt earthquakes, regardless of magnitude, maps the area where the earthquake was felt, and identifies, under certain circumstances, zones of widespread damage through the coincidental loss of existing Internet sessions at the time of the earthquake (Bossu et al. , 2011b). In a similar effort, Earle et al. (2010, 2011) show how Twitter, the real‐time micro‐blogging site, can be used to independently detect felt earthquakes without seismic‐monitoring systems. Allen (2012) reviews these methods, which may transform earthquake detection, and Bossu and Earle (2011) and Young et al. (2013) discuss how citizen involvement changes earthquake detection and science. This work aims first at validating the assumption that the traffic surge is effectively caused by eyewitnesses. Although awareness of the EMSC Website remains limited in the United States, we choose to study the 2011 M 5.8 Mineral, Virginia, earthquake, because it occurred in a continental environment and was felt at large distances (Hough, 2012), maximizing the time differences of …