Geological processes, such as plate tectonics, erupting volcanoes, advancing glaciers and rivernetworks, have altered Earth's surface over billions of years.
But it scored with news networks recently when one of the first pictures to be posted from the Hudson River plane crash was obtained by a Twitterer on his phone and immediately posted through Twitpic.
Each of the eight FRIEND networks shares information, data and techniques, in order to monitor climate variability and change in river basins in a given region.