Journal article
Science Website Traffic in Earthquakes
MC Quigley, AM Forte
SEISMOLOGICAL RESEARCH LETTERS | SEISMOLOGICAL SOC AMER | Published : 2017
DOI: 10.1785/0220160172
Abstract
Science communication in natural disasters is important to society but rarely informed by quantitative analysis of website traffic patterns. Analysis of science website traffic during the 2010–2012 Canterbury earthquake sequence in New Zealand reveals near‐instantaneous traffic surges after strong earthquakes followed by heavy‐tailed power‐law temporal decay consistent with Omori law for aftershocks. Traffic perturbations scale with earthquake magnitude and population exposure to strong shaking. Traffic also increases in response to public communications by the affiliated website operator. Website traffic decays with increasing seismic sequence duration but is ultimately sustained at levels ..
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Funding Acknowledgements
Funding for this work was provided to M. Q. through the 2011 New Zealand Prime Minister's Prize for Science Communication. We thank Kevin Fenaughty for provision and discussion of GeoNet data, Chris Crowe for provision of Canterbury QuakeLive data, James McPherson and Nik Devidas for provision of DrQuigs data, and the University of Canterbury and Anekant Wandres for provision of UC Geology data. We dedicate this work to the earthquake affected residents of Canterbury, New Zealand.