When disaster hits, internet has emerged as a powerful platform for communication among residents and emergency responses. But during a natural calamity, would any emoji be a comfortable line of communication? Well researchers feel so! A worldwide design campaign which aims at finding a proper emoji that will represent earthquake. The researchers say that emojis could make a difference during such emergencies, where every second counts. Scientists initiated the campaign in a bid to use “the world’s fastest-developing language” to help in spreading quake awareness in a better way.

“Although there is an emoji for other natural disasters and weather events, there is no universal emoji for earthquakes and ground shaking,” told the campaign founder Stephen Hicks to China Plus. The Seismologist from the University of Southampton, England along with seven other researchers from the United States of America, France and Costa Rica, promoted the campaign on social media. And the designs are expected to be done and submitted by July 14, 2018. Once the emojis are shortlisted, they will be judged by all the eight scientists based on the norm “evocative, simple, universal and distinctive.”

Later the selected ones will be posted on Twitter for the netizens to vote for the winner. A proposal further will be prepared to add winner in the Unicode emoji selection group. So far, developers have introduced emojis for other natural disasters and weather events. They feel that a universal emoji will make a difference for such ground shaking. “It is not clear whether emojis have any relations with the response time in emergency situations, but emojis could be used as seismometers on social media,” Hicks was quoted saying.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jun 10, 2018 09:48 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).