No doubt, earthquakes are devastating disasters, and although there's little we can do to prevent them, we can at least alert ourselves if an earthquake is coming. A teen / boy from Chile has created just that, a rather interesting earthquake detection system that utilises Twitter.

After earthquakes in Chile and Japan, a Chilean teen Sebastian Alegria, decided to create a unique earthquake detector that would be able to alert and possibly save thousands of lives. Sebastian's earthquake detector consists of a $75 earthquake detector that had its internal circuit replaced with an Arduino board that is connected to Sebastian's server. After hacking and modding the earthquake detector a bit, he managed to connect it to Twitter, and now this detector can send tweets in case of earthquakes via a twitterbot. So far, the earthquake detector has already racked up 40, 000 Twitter followers, and we don't doubt that there will be more of them very soon.

As for the future of this detector, Sebastian has plans to expand its idea to other parts of the country and to add a SMS alert system as well.

[via Hack A Day]