EGB13

Data on thousands of earthquakes in the New Madrid Seismic Zone since 1974 is available from the Center for Earthquake Research and Information at the University of Memphis.  Most of those were too small to feel.  But they’re real interested in that zone at Memphis because they’re awfully close to it, and it has unleashed some monster quakes in the past.

The data includes the estimated depth of the quakes as well as the geographic coordinates.  Below is my first effort to use that data to visualize the fault zone in 3 dimensions.  There is a lot of data that gets in its own way, so an animation that tilts and rotates was chosen as a a means to see it from different angles.

In order to view this animation you need a modern browser that supports HTML5 videos in Ogg Theora format.  The current versions of FireFox and Chrome work., though if you insist there is another version on YouTube.

I’m fairly well pleased with how it turned out, but I’m concerned the reliability of some of the data.  That is discussed below along with notes on how it was produced.

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