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The internet and the earthquake: how the web reacted to Nepal's killer shock

By Stuart Thomas

28 Apr 2015

The earthquake which struck Nepal over the weekend measured 7.8 on the Richter scale and the devastation it wrought has been immense. More than 3,600 people are now known to have died in Nepal, India and China. A further 6,500 have been injured and 200 climbers have had to be evacuated from Mount Everest. Perhaps the most remarkable thing however is how quickly we've received this information and how rapid the response of some of some of the world's biggest tech companies has been.

The internet and the earthquake: how the web reacted to Nepal's killer shock

Experiencing disasters in (near) real-time

It's not all that long ago that it would have taken the world days to learn of the damage caused by the Nepal quake. Everest's popularity as the highest peak on the planet would probably have seen communication coming from it to the outside world, but verifying facts and counting the total dead would have been an arduous process.

On Saturday, tweets about the quake started emerging almost immediately as people took to social media both to let their loved ones know they were safe and to share images of the devastation...

Continue reading the full article here.

Stuart Thomas

About Stuart Thomas

Stuart abandoned what was beginning to look like a long, quiet career in academia for the frenetic world of tech journalism. Currently heading up the Memeburn team, he likes to run in in his downtime. He won an award once. It now sits on his desk.