The Beginning - Red and Green
The website geonet.org.nz that we all know and love, first appeared on the internet on May 20 2002.
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| Home |
As you can see it was pretty basic, with just the latest quakes and volcano cameras and volcanic alert levels.
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| Recent Quakes |
It was nice and bright (and festive) and featured our lovely red and yellow stars for the earthquakes locations.
In April 2004 we added in 'Felt it' to the quakes, so you could tell us how and where you felt an earthquake.
Fun Fact: To date, the most felt reports we have ever received for an earthquake was 13,900+ for a M3.9 Auckland Quake!
April 2007 - 5 shades of Gray
In 2007 we had a big update, as well as a fresh new look we added in a lot more information on our volcanoes, quakes, landslide and tsunami. We also added in information on our network, data and maps and our latest news.
2010 - Canterbury
Now when the Sept 4 Darfield earthquake occurred, the website looked pretty similar, though it had the cool 'Shake Map' which lit up when an earthquake occurred. (why did this go?)
It was this time that GeoNet became a household name, if you check out the 'Google Trends' graph below you will see we were flying under the radar for a bit! Luckily we had an awesome team of geeks and our website stood up to this heavy traffic!
Fun fact: we had more web traffic in the week following the Sept 4 quake than the whole previous year!
Back in 2010 we had our duty officers locating the earthquakes and this took up to 20min so it was around this time we were getting the "Hurry up GeoNet, how big was it" comments!
And due to the large amount of aftershocks we were locating, we were limiting the quakes posted on the website, to the larger, more widely felt events. So then we had lots of “I
felt it, why isn’t it on the website” comments! So we knew we needed to fix this!
The Fix
In 2011 we started testing the Automated system SeisCompP3 (If you are wondering why we didn't do this sooner, check out this Blog post by the GeoNet Boss)
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| Comparing the two systems EQ posting time |
So instead of a person logging on to their computer after they were alerted of an event, SeisComP3 automatically went to work as soon as the data started coming in!
And in 2012 we launched the 'GeoNet Rapid' Beta website and then in September it went live. This was the biggest change to the website yet, and it took people a while to get used to the new way but the speed was definitely appreciated. You can read more on how it works here
And this brings us to the website we have now, it may not be obvious but we are always working behind the scenes on geonet.org.nz to keep it awesome, and continue to make it better!
