Earthquakes (2 mb)Earthquakes (3/20/06 — 3/27/06)
Description:
Earthquakes occur naturally everyday. Anything that causes seismic waves to radiate throughout the Earth is an earthquake. There are two main types of earthquakes, tectonic and anthropogenic (caused by humans). Tectonic earthquakes are naturally occurring and are caused by earth movement. The surface of the Earth is composed of a mosaic tectonic plates moving with respect to each other. When two plates glide past one another, a stress builds up at the boundary. When that stress reaches a critical level, the boundary slips and the result is an earthquake. The traces of repeated slips are known as fault lines. Anthropogenic earthquakes can be caused by drilling for fossil fuels, extraction of minerals, huge explosions, and the collapse of large buildings.
Most earthquakes are small enough to hardly be noticed; however, some can be very powerful causing widespread death and destruction and can even trigger tsunamis. The Richter magnitude scale was created to rate the strength and magnitude of earthquakes. It is a base-10 logarithm scale of ground motion 100km from the epicenter. Each increase of 1 magnitude means 10 times greater ground motion. This dataset displays all of the earthquakes every hour from March 20, 2006 through March 27, 2006. Each earthquake is represented by a circle of varying size and color. Yellow is for earthquakes less than 2 on the Richter scale, orange is for earthquakes with a magnitude 2 through 5 on the Richter scale and red is for earthquakes with a magnitude greater than five. The most recent earthquakes are the most opaque, and then as the day progresses they fade away. The diameter of the circle in kilometers is equal to the Richter scale value multiplied by 100. Notice that many of the earthquakes occur along plate boundaries.
Notable Features:
- Circles indicate earthquake; both color and size indicate magnitude
- Majority of earthquakes along plate boundaries
Data Category
Major: Land
Keywords:
Land, earthquake, plate tectonics
| Data Set Name | Earthquakes |
| Data Set Directory Name | earthquake/original |
| Data Set Source | United States Geological Survey |
| Data Set Developer | Space Science and Engineering Center |
| Visualization Developer | Space Science and Engineering Center |
| Audio | No |
| Download | FTP |