The 3D view is really interesting (click "Draw Cross Section" lower right), but the main map view is not very useful. Try zooming into New Zealand, or even down to the South Island of New Zealand, and plot a decade start 2007 to 2017. You would be hard pressed to see the two city-levelling destroying earthquakes and one town destroying earthquake we had (Sep 2010, Feb 2011, Nov 2016).
I think the main issue is colour and scale. The magnitude is logarithmic, but the scale of the circles are not.
We experience earthquakes in New Zealand all the time. Th last one was 10 hours ago [1] with a total of three yesterday. So in places you would expect large quakes, you also get lots and lots of small ones.
On a side note, Google beta-tested their early earthquake warning system in New Zealand and it was opt-out. I had students diving under desks in a Deep Learning class because the warning sound emitted was very much like the govt. emergency SMS messages. It was a very minor quake, I am not sure we even felt it.
I played with Kepler GL a couple of years ago to visualise the Canterbury quakes. It's kinda phenomenal to see how frequent the little ones are, and the aftershocks from big ones take a while to drop off...
It's very glitchy for me on firefox on linux, with many of the quakes not rendering or flickering as if they render in the wrong order and are covered by the base map.
The artifacts change randomly if I zoom and pan around, but it isn't easy to control. For example, in the default global view when opened, it only seems to show quakes in the South Pacific near NZ.
Ah, the joys of desktop graphics on Linux... it's using WebGL 1 from 2011 which should be passing through to some extremely basic OpenGL ES 2.0 calls and Linux is the one place that shouldn't even need API translation. It's thankfully working fine for me but browser GPU acceleration has just been a never ending disappointment on Linux so it's no surprise.
This is a nice visualizer for the time series data. I am constantly annoyed by the zoom in/out feature because it apparently doesn't allow display of all longitudes from dateline to dateline, left to right. There appears to be a stripe of missing longitudes that one is only able to see if they zoom out one level so that large sections of the globe are repeated. This is not a complaint that is unique to this display, it is very common.
After pointing out that annoyance I hate to mention too that the data could use some cleaning of duplicate entries related to slight differences in focal locations.
One set of triplicates that demonstrates this is located east of Greenland and is visible when parameters are set to display >6.5 magnitude quakes. The event is a 6.8 quake which occurs on 11/8/2018 at 7:49:40 pm UTC for an event at 10 km depth and there are three locations for the same event (one of them has a time stamp two seconds earlier but is unlikely to be a different event of the same magnitude).
I suspect that the display uses information from multiple sources that have not been cleaned for duplicates. I believe it would be difficult to identify all instances of duplication in a dataset like this for quakes of lower magnitudes especially.
Anyway, I like it but I did stumble on or against a couple of things that I thought noteworthy.
Good job overall, the easy part is done and it works and is a useful display.
I don't see a way to share a particular view, but it is wild to see the magnitude of change in earthquake rates in oil and gas producing areas. For example, zoom into Oklahoma and click play, almost nothing happens from 1980 to 2010 then the map suddenly fills up.
Very impressive. I love how subsidence zones are clearly visible in the 3d view.
I think if I had a feature request it would be an option to have a fixed interval(or window) of time visible, rather that the current method of a fixed start time. for example one year behind current. This can sort of be achieved by moving the start and end bugs in sync, but that was less than satisfying in practice. The thing that would make sense is to be able to drag the illuminated part of the time line.
If I had a second feature request it would be to assign what feature(depth, age, magnitude) is mapped to the color axis, nothing wrong with depth here, I just noted that it was redundant in the 3d view.
For those wondering why "All" just means a bunch in one small geographic area... there's some bug that you need to zoom in and zoom out a bunch of times as a workaround for.
Historically virtually all cities were located either along coastlines or major river transport, as shipping was far and away the cheapest way to move large volumes (and masses) of goods. Even today that pattern remains strong.
Tectonic movement is also associated with factors that often produce economically-critical natural resources, from minerals to simply fertilising soil. Australia, which sees little seismic activity, has famously infertile farmland, in which even minuscule additions of mineral fertilisers --- not the Big Three of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, but trace minerals such as iron, copper, selenium, zinc, and manganese. Again, that's where cities tend to form.
And coastlines are strongly associated with earthquakes, especially those along subduction zones (Western Americas, Eastern Asia). Not only do those have many earthquakes, but some of the largest and most destructive, along with tsunamis which can further the devastation.
Note that coasts nearer to rift zones (eastern Americas, western Europe, both west & east Africa) have fewer earthquakes. Several of those also have major populations.
The 3D view is really interesting (click "Draw Cross Section" lower right), but the main map view is not very useful. Try zooming into New Zealand, or even down to the South Island of New Zealand, and plot a decade start 2007 to 2017. You would be hard pressed to see the two city-levelling destroying earthquakes and one town destroying earthquake we had (Sep 2010, Feb 2011, Nov 2016).
I think the main issue is colour and scale. The magnitude is logarithmic, but the scale of the circles are not.
We experience earthquakes in New Zealand all the time. Th last one was 10 hours ago [1] with a total of three yesterday. So in places you would expect large quakes, you also get lots and lots of small ones.
On a side note, Google beta-tested their early earthquake warning system in New Zealand and it was opt-out. I had students diving under desks in a Deep Learning class because the warning sound emitted was very much like the govt. emergency SMS messages. It was a very minor quake, I am not sure we even felt it.
[1] https://www.geonet.org.nz/earthquake/weak
I played with Kepler GL a couple of years ago to visualise the Canterbury quakes. It's kinda phenomenal to see how frequent the little ones are, and the aftershocks from big ones take a while to drop off...
https://itnext.io/using-kepler-gl-to-visualise-over-35-000-e... for the curious
Very nice. I didn't even know we (New Zealand) had that many quakes over that time, I thought it was closer to 10,000.
It's very glitchy for me on firefox on linux, with many of the quakes not rendering or flickering as if they render in the wrong order and are covered by the base map.
The artifacts change randomly if I zoom and pan around, but it isn't easy to control. For example, in the default global view when opened, it only seems to show quakes in the South Pacific near NZ.
Ah, the joys of desktop graphics on Linux... it's using WebGL 1 from 2011 which should be passing through to some extremely basic OpenGL ES 2.0 calls and Linux is the one place that shouldn't even need API translation. It's thankfully working fine for me but browser GPU acceleration has just been a never ending disappointment on Linux so it's no surprise.
This is a nice visualizer for the time series data. I am constantly annoyed by the zoom in/out feature because it apparently doesn't allow display of all longitudes from dateline to dateline, left to right. There appears to be a stripe of missing longitudes that one is only able to see if they zoom out one level so that large sections of the globe are repeated. This is not a complaint that is unique to this display, it is very common.
After pointing out that annoyance I hate to mention too that the data could use some cleaning of duplicate entries related to slight differences in focal locations.
One set of triplicates that demonstrates this is located east of Greenland and is visible when parameters are set to display >6.5 magnitude quakes. The event is a 6.8 quake which occurs on 11/8/2018 at 7:49:40 pm UTC for an event at 10 km depth and there are three locations for the same event (one of them has a time stamp two seconds earlier but is unlikely to be a different event of the same magnitude).
I suspect that the display uses information from multiple sources that have not been cleaned for duplicates. I believe it would be difficult to identify all instances of duplication in a dataset like this for quakes of lower magnitudes especially.
Anyway, I like it but I did stumble on or against a couple of things that I thought noteworthy.
Good job overall, the easy part is done and it works and is a useful display.
I don't see a way to share a particular view, but it is wild to see the magnitude of change in earthquake rates in oil and gas producing areas. For example, zoom into Oklahoma and click play, almost nothing happens from 1980 to 2010 then the map suddenly fills up.
It’s probably not in the record but this is also true in Colorado in the 1930s which is the first observation of induced seismically afaik
Applies to certain former coal mining regions as well (like the Ruhr valley)
Very impressive. I love how subsidence zones are clearly visible in the 3d view.
I think if I had a feature request it would be an option to have a fixed interval(or window) of time visible, rather that the current method of a fixed start time. for example one year behind current. This can sort of be achieved by moving the start and end bugs in sync, but that was less than satisfying in practice. The thing that would make sense is to be able to drag the illuminated part of the time line.
If I had a second feature request it would be to assign what feature(depth, age, magnitude) is mapped to the color axis, nothing wrong with depth here, I just noted that it was redundant in the 3d view.
For those wondering why "All" just means a bunch in one small geographic area... there's some bug that you need to zoom in and zoom out a bunch of times as a workaround for.
It is crazy to see the amount of major cities that are on top of high risk areas.
Including Atlantis! ;-)
(Mid-Atlantic Rift Zone.)
Historically virtually all cities were located either along coastlines or major river transport, as shipping was far and away the cheapest way to move large volumes (and masses) of goods. Even today that pattern remains strong.
Tectonic movement is also associated with factors that often produce economically-critical natural resources, from minerals to simply fertilising soil. Australia, which sees little seismic activity, has famously infertile farmland, in which even minuscule additions of mineral fertilisers --- not the Big Three of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, but trace minerals such as iron, copper, selenium, zinc, and manganese. Again, that's where cities tend to form.
And coastlines are strongly associated with earthquakes, especially those along subduction zones (Western Americas, Eastern Asia). Not only do those have many earthquakes, but some of the largest and most destructive, along with tsunamis which can further the devastation.
Note that coasts nearer to rift zones (eastern Americas, western Europe, both west & east Africa) have fewer earthquakes. Several of those also have major populations.
The boundaries between tectonic plates are usually really rich in minerals, water, and other resources. Perfect conditions to build society.
You are missing the biggest one, Chile on May 22, 1960
Does not seem to work on mobile
Needs a speed adjuster
Amazing that starting in ~2010 you can literally see where Oklahoma went all-in on fracking.