[HN Gopher] Data viz project that maps all earthquakes by magnitude
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Data viz project that maps all earthquakes by magnitude
Author : therabbithole
Score : 40 points
Date : 2024-10-24 18:29 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (seismic-explorer.concord.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (seismic-explorer.concord.org)
| emreb wrote:
| It is crazy to see the amount of major cities that are on top of
| high risk areas.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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.
| somat wrote:
| 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.
| Cerium wrote:
| 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.
| saltcured wrote:
| 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.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| 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
| beatthatflight wrote:
| 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
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