eleventyone

Two earthquakes recently hit Melbourne – events so rare in this place that it sent social networking sites buzzing. The first at 9pm, Friday 6th March of maginitude 4.7 on the Richter scale and the second at 4:30pm, Wednesday 18th March measursing 4.5, both with their epicentre 5kms north-west of Korumburra, in South Gippsland.

The quakes shook the online world too. Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter were immediately flooded with posts about each quake. Confused people questioned if they were feeling an earthquake, others asked if other people felt it, some people reported houses shaking.  Melbourne Earthquake became a trending topic on Twitter with a thousand posts within the hour each time. Reports didn’t appear in the news media online, until several hours later. The seismology research centre reported the events online (www.seis.com.au) and asks users to report an earthquake they have felt on their website.