When it comes to eyewitness accounts of earthquake shaking, acting matters – YubaNet

As scientists increasingly rely on eyewitness accounts of earthquake shaking reported through online systems, they should consider whether these accounts are socially and spatially representative of an event, according to a new research paper published in Seismology Research Letters.

Marina District in San Francisco after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake JK Nakata / USGS

Socioeconomic factors can play an important role if it’s complicated in determining who’s using systems like “Did you feel it?” From the US Geological Survey? (DYFI) for reporting earthquake vibration. In California, for example, researchers concluded that DYFI appears to be gathering data across a broad socio-economic scale, albeit with some interesting differences related to neighborhood income levels during earthquakes such as the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquakes, Northridge 1994 and 2018 Ridgecrest.

In India, by contrast, stark gaps in literacy and urban versus rural communities can lead to gaps in self-reported earthquake accounts through DYFI, writes Susan Hogg of the USGS and Stacy Martin of the Australian National University.

Previous studies have investigated why people respond to DYFI, including a 2016 publication by Sum Mak and Danijel Schorlemmer. But the socio-economic differences in who reported the earthquake “are a factor we haven’t thought about enough, although it does shape the data sets available, especially outside the United States,” Hough said.

Density data from DYFI are used to develop ShakeMap representations of Earth’s motion in locations with scattered devices. ShakeMap in turn informs the immediate evaluation of the Global Earthquake Response System (PAGER) that provides critical rapid information for earthquake response.

“The end result is that we depend on non-acting [DYFI] Data to capture ShakeMaps’ maps of large global earthquakes, “Hugh noted.” If the data are limited and unrepresentative, PAGER may not give emergency managers a good indication of where to direct their resources. “

Martin added, “I know many people who take DYFI notes from outside the US on the surface without any scrutiny and assume that’s all in the story.” “As we explained in this study, that would be a really inappropriate assumption.”

Representation can also play a role when scientists rely on archival accounts to study historical earthquakes. Haug described the potential impact of unrepresentative earthquake reports in a previous study when she and co-worker Morgan Page found a letter published in an Arkansas newspaper that helped re-locate the 1882 earthquake within the Choctaw area of ​​southeast Oklahoma. Hogg said that the Single Chance account helped seismologists better understand historical earthquakes in Oklahoma, but that there are still many “unknowns” about earthquakes in the area during and after the 1882 event because Native American accounts are not available.

When Hogg and Martin compared the DYFI responses with average household income in the postal code for the three California earthquakes, the researchers discovered some intriguing and complex trends. For the Northridge earthquake, for example, relatively rich regions were more likely to contribute to robust shaking reports, and strong vibration levels from poor areas may not be underrepresented in the DYFI data.

The researchers found that in India, DYFI reports are highly skewed towards urban individuals and highly dependent on the literacy rates of the region. In some cases, the difference between DYFI’s self-reports and accounts collected through traditional means such as local press accounts was significant. For the 2015 Gorkha earthquake, for example, 74% of DYFI responses were from urban areas, while only 34% of traditional accounts were from urban centers.

Martin said: “As an Indian, I know firsthand that there are disparities on many fronts in my country.” “However, the stark contrast in the DYFI reports in urban and rural India of the three earthquakes analyzed for this study still amazes me. I did not expect the social disparities to appear in something that seems so far-fetched as the reports of earthquake poetry.”

The further development of online systems is likely to make them more inclusive; For example, including online surveys in multiple languages, and designing easy-to-use apps. The researchers said it was also still important to survey the impacts of earthquakes using media reports, which the study showed tends to be more comprehensive in India.

Hogg noted that the Earth science community is grappling with how underrepresentation affects its workforce, but studies like this show how underrepresented “is actually a problem for science itself.”

“You can connect the dots, I think,” she said. “If you don’t have a diverse community of scientists, you won’t have people asking the right questions.”

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