News of the magnitude 5.5 earthquake on the Ontario-Quebec border on 23 June 2010 broke on Twitter before the media or the US Geological Survey had anything to say about it. Within minutes there were dozens of reports from across the eastern seaboard, some describing what had just happened and others asking how big it had been — which between them gave an early picture of how widely the tremor had been felt.
The volume had as much to do with timing and geography as with the platform. The quake struck at 1:41 p.m. on a working day, when a large number of people on the east coast were at a desk and already online, and it was felt in dense urban centres from Montreal and Ottawa down into US east coast cities. A Trendsmap reading of the #earthquake hashtag put the heaviest concentration of messages in Toronto.