{"id":1062,"date":"2011-03-13T19:14:51","date_gmt":"2011-03-13T17:14:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/?p=1062"},"modified":"2011-03-13T19:57:24","modified_gmt":"2011-03-13T17:57:24","slug":"japan-earthquake-an-exploratory-view","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/japan-earthquake-an-exploratory-view\/","title":{"rendered":"Japan Earthquake: An Exploratory View"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thanks to the data<\/a> provided by the USGS<\/a>, we can take a look at all earthquakes since 1973, which cover almost the last 40 years of earthquake activity worldwide.<\/p>\n

Let’s first take a look at the yearly development of the earthquake activity overall:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The apparent increase in the last 10 years is striking – though I don’t have any explanation for this change, which is most probably not even man-made. Interestingly the magnitude (see next figure) does not increase, though the chance of stronger earthquakes will grow with the overall number.<\/p>\n

The distribution of magnitudes (which is used for the coloring) is even more striking, looking at the earthquake in Japan, March 11th which is now rated as a 9.0.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The whole dataset contains only one earthquake at a higher magnitude, i.e., the earthquake originating the terrible tsunami on the 2nd Christmas day in 2004 at a magnitude of 9.1.<\/p>\n

Keep in mind that the Richter scale<\/a> is logarithmic<\/span><\/strong>, i.e., stepping up one unit means a 10 times stronger earthquake. The strongest ever measured earthquake<\/a> was in Chile in 1960 at 9.5.<\/p>\n

If we look at the coordinates of the measurements in longitudes and latitudes, we see how much the activity is concentrated on the tectonic hotspots.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We roughly see the shapes of some continents, with one exception. Africa seems to be free of any activity; probably due to the fact that it sits happily on its own tectonic plate.<\/p>\n

Looking at this data, we can only start to understand the devastation Japan is facing.<\/p>\n

(The data<\/a> can be loaded directly into Mondrian<\/a>, which was used to create the graphs above.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks to the data provided by the USGS, we can take a look at all earthquakes since 1973, which cover almost the last 40 years of earthquake activity worldwide. Let’s first take a look at the yearly development of the earthquake activity overall: The apparent increase in the last 10 years is striking – though […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-mondrian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1062"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1062\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1073,"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1062\/revisions\/1073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}