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Phoenix666 writes:

Residents have been using Dahl Hith, a water-filled cave outside Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to cool off for years. They have also left graffiti on the cave walls. Now that smartphones have multiplied and people have used them to upload videos of their excursions to YouTube, researchers have started using the writing as reference points to track the water table in the region:

They use the writing as reference points to estimate the position of the water table.

Some of these scribbles have dates in them; and some of the videos themselves incorporate time information.

All of this data has allowed the team to reconstruct past conditions in Dahl Hith.

"Since smartphones have become so popular and deliver quite good video quality - such data becomes useable. A few years ago, some people would have criticised it as 'grey data', and said 'you shouldn't use it'. But since there is no other data, you need to be creative," said Nils Michelsen, from the Institute for Applied Geosciences, TU Darmstadt, Germany.

He has been presenting his team's work at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly in Vienna, Austria.

The cave study is another example in what is becoming a significant trend - the trawling of social media for scientifically valuable information.

It's a creative use of the medium, and unexpected. It's slightly reminiscent, too, of the fellow a few years back who mined Facebook to discern migration patterns and interest regions in the United States. Are there other, unexpected externalities of social media or mobile technology Soylentils have come across?