Watch The Virginia Earthquake Spread Across Twitter

You’ve seen the XKCD comic showing how tweets about an earthquake eventually spread faster than the quake itself, and now here’s the proof.

Yesterday’s earthquake rattled the US east coast. But if you were online, you may have read about it before you felt it. It completely lit up Twitter. Now here’s a look at how those tweets moved from place to place

Miguel Rios of Twitter’s analytics team just posted this visualisation of the spread of earthquake-related Tweets. You can clearly see them spreading out from close to the epicentre in Virginia across the Eastern Seaboard and into Ohio, Illinois and the Midwest, all in less than 30 seconds.

Twitter really does move information at an entirely new speed. But pro tip from a Californian: you should still duck and cover before you grab your phone.