Tectonic Earthquakes: Patterns in space and time
Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash
First, plate motions (plate tectonics) on Earth is driven by the convection of the deep interior, or mantle. Here’s a movie of convection over two billion years, BILLION!, sped up to play in 36 seconds:
If we slow way down, we can look at and hear something like what those plates sound like as they grind past each other and cause earthquakes. To do so, we animate the data with sound, using these rules to generate these movies of ``earthquake catalogs’’, or lists of earthquakes by location, date, magnitude, etc.
Seven years of earthquakes in California:
Seven years of earthquakes in the Carribean (including the 2010 Haiti Earthquake):
Seven years of earthquakes in Japan (including the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake, Magnitude 9.0):
and Seven years of earthquakes in Sumatra (including the 2004 Boxing Day earthquake, Magnitude 9.2):
And in the Andes, as the Pacific plate subducts beneath Chile, in 3D (made by Martin Pratt):
And the grand finale: 20 years of earthquakes on the whole planet (made by Joachim Gossmann):
