On Saturday 11th August, two earthquakes measuring 6.4 and 6.3 on the moment magnitude scale rumbled through the highly populated region of Azarbayjan-e Khavari in Iran, 53km from Tabriz.The earthquakes and killed 306 people and injured 3,037, according to Health Minister Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi. He also said that "we are continuing the search for bodies", so an increase on the death number is not discarded. More than 16,000 people have lost their houses, they are having temporary shelter in 3,000 tents and thousands of blankets, food and water have been distributed.
Mobile phones can be used to nowcast and predict population displacement after major disasters. After the devastating 2010 Haiti earthquake, the team of the Swedish NGO Flowminder analyzed the movement of 1.9 million mobile users before and after the earthquake using location data from mobile phones.
GPS devices can be a powerful tool to quickly pinpoint the location and magnitude of strong earthquakes. In order to improve the use of GPS in responding to major earthquakes, the new Real-time Earthquake Analysis for Disaster (READI)
On 11 April 2012 a 8.6 magnitude earthquake occurred at 8.38 UTC, 437 km southwest of Banda Aceh in Indonesia and 33 km beneath the ocean floor, prompting a tsunami watch to be immediately issued for Australia, Bangladesh, Comoros, Crozet Islands, Diego Garcia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Kenya, Kerguelen Islands, Madagascar, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritius, Mozambique, Myanmar, Oman, Pakistan, Reunion, Seychelles, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Somalia, South Africa, Tanzania, Thailand, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.
When a series of storms and twisters hit at least 10 states in the USA at the end of February, many victims used social media channels to report their status or those of neighbors and friends. That way they could indicate their exact location to family or search parties by just a single tweet or a facebook post. The app "Foursquare" for example allows users to "check in" to specific locations. Twitter's twittermap works similarly showing users' location on Google Maps. Facebook's Places page allow geotagging on Bing Maps.
On the anniversary of the japanese earthquake and tsunami Google Maps published new satellite imagery of the affected areas. The GeoEye high-resolution imagery covers the Northeastern coast from Hachinohe in Aomori Prefecture down to Hitachi City in Ibaraki Prefecture. The imagery was taken in February and March 2012.
Three key research centers and a consortium of Internet companies said on Thursday they would work together on a European cloud computing platform to handle the continent's rapidly growing demand for computer capacity.
NTT DOCOMO, INC., Japan’s leading mobile operator and provider of integrated services centered on mobility, announced today that it has nearly completed implementation of a wide range of disaster-
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