I’ve spent the last two days glued to various reports associated with the 9.0 quake in Sumatra… and the ensuing tsunami.
I first heard of it not through the mainstream media… but through my Bloglines EQuake RSS feed (that link is now now deactivated, see below for new links). I was dumbfounded when I read the USGS summary…
My geology side and learning tech side don’t always walk hand-in-hand… but that was one of those strange convergence things. I had started monitoring that RSS feed when I started teaching this fall, and now look at it daily.
I cannot believe the number of big (>6.0) aftershocks… as some have said, the Earth is ringing like a bell from that one…
Further convergence today came with the NY Times article “Blogs Provide Raw Details From Scene of the Disaster“.
The weblog accounts coming out of the disaster area are heart wrenching. The shift from the Christmas pictures to disaster photos at http://sumankumar.com/ struck me like nothing has in some time.
The power of people connecting through this medium is immense.
The NY Times article (which you may have to sign up for their free subscription to see, not sure) does a really good job of pointing out the strength of both weblogs and mainstream media.
Power of people and the power of the Earth… convergence of my two worlds…
Addendum
Looks like the USGS has just retired the original link I used. You can now subscribe to one of three RSS feeds, for earthquakes of three magnitude and date ranges). See this page for the links:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/recenteqsww/rss.html
I created a link to the original list and had it render inside my WebCT course this past term.