In this episode of its awesomely named podcast series CoreCast, U.S. Geological Survey scientists flesh out some of the details of how they're turning to Twitter to do earthquake detection and response. Like other experts working in the natural disaster space, USGS is weighing the increased speed of Twitter against the diminished authoritativeness of tweets -- and finding it's worth sacrificing a bit of the certainty generally required by government action to tap into the collected wisdom and experience of the crowd.

So how do U.S. Geological Survey researchers mine Twitter for earthquake data? They start by searching for the word "earthquake" in tweets (or its equivalent in a range of languages) and then they go from there.

Related: A techPresident interview with FEMA director Craig Fugate on using social media to cope with natural disasters