Someone sent in this link to an interesting visualization of earthquake activity around Japan for the year of 2011. It starts off quiet, until the big earthquake that shook Japan and caused the nuclear “incident” that they are cleaning up to this day. Watch the video and it’s quite apparent that the massive earthquakes that shoot the island actually lasted for several months before quieting down.
One of the winners at this summer’s SciDAC Visualization Night was an impressive visualization of a massive 8.0 earthquake on the San Andreas fault.
The simulation follows the rapid expansion of an earthquake wave front on the San Andreas fault as it approaches the city of San Diego. The strongest motions correspond to a white color and the weakest, a red color, with the ground motion magnitude represented as a height field.
The simulation took almost a quarter-million cores of Jaguar and Kraken (both NSF machines at ORNL), and shows the leading edge of the shock front.
Combing through the massive amounts of data regarding this year’s massive 9.0 earthquake off the coast of Japan, researchers have found mountains of useful information. Visualizing it all usefully has proven tricky, but some new techniques coming out of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks show promise.
“When the massive data set from Japan became available through the ARIA project of JPL-Caltech, I had to come up with a better way to look at all this information,” said geophysicist Ronni Grapenthin at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.
Check out the impressive video of the data below. Researchers hope that it will pave the way for new real-time GPS monitoring stations that can deliver these same results instantly, making for far more accurate predictions of earthquake strength in the future.
Japan has just suffered another 7.4 Earthquake a mere 100km from the previous location, and ESRI is already on the case with updated maps showing the location.
Japan Earthquake and Tsunami – Map & Satellite Images | Disaster Relief & Support.
One enterprising VizWorld reader sent me a link to a nice Google Mashup of USGS Earthquake data, cataloging every major quake of the last century.
The data is originally from USGS and was made available by someone as a spreadsheet. I updated it with information from Wikipedia, especially on 2010 and 2011 earthquakes. I also added country and continent information and several Wikipedia links. The updated data is also available as spreadsheet on Google docs.
Benjamin Hennig has created a new map visualizing areas hardest hit by Earthquakes from 2010BC to present, showing that the areas currently being hit hard by quakes really aren’t getting anything new.
The database created by NOAA’s National Geophysical Data Center “contains information on destructive earthquakes from 2150 B.C. to the present that meet at least one of the following criteria: Moderate damage (approximately $1 million or more), 10 or more deaths, Magnitude 7.5 or greater, Modified Mercalli Intensity X or greater, or the earthquake generated a tsunami“.
Following an approach of spatial-analyst.net, a kernel density has been calculated from these records to visualise the areas most at risk of earthquakes during that time period.
I really wish he hadn’t distorted the map by intensity and rather left it looking traditional with a heatmap overlay, but either way it’s quite plain to see that South America, western North America, and the East Coast of Asia have long-been prone to quakes.
via People at Risk: Visualising Global Earthquake Intensity | Views of the World.
Over on Vimeo, folks at DataMarket.net have taken data published by the Icelandic Met Office and created a movie showing the earthquakes leading up to the eruption of in Eyjafjallajökull, Iceland in March 2010.
They tell me that this is just the first of many visualizations they plan to make utilizing this Icelandic Earthquake data.
We will follow up on this one in the next few days with a few more visualizations using Icelandic earthquake data, trying to explain some of the geology and consequences of the country being slowly ripped apart by tectonic plates.
Earthquakes and Eruption in Iceland 2010 from hjalli on Vimeo.
Earthquakes are no laughing matter, but the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management has done a pretty successful job of at least making them pretty. Their new “QuakeQuiz” website presents 6 common scenarios and asks the users what to do. With some crisp clean infographic-style visuals, it’s pretty and educational at the same time.
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