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Seismic activities around the world

Mapping earthquake and nuclear bombs with leaflet

Since 1965, an average of 441 Earthquake with magnitude more than 5.5 happened around the world each year. A magnitude of 5.5–6.0 can cause slight damage while amagnitude of 6.1 or more may cause significant damages in populated areas.

Magnitude 6.1 or over
Magnitude 6.1 or over

This dataset from The National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC ) contains data on date time, coordinates, magnitude and type of earthquake (not all earthquakes are caused by nature, a few are seismic activities caused by nuclear bomb in 1960s-1990s.)

When looking at significant earthquakes, we can see a high concentration of east Asia and Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia.

Magnitude 5.5–6.0
Magnitude 5.5–6.0

Visualizing these less significant earthquakes gives us a clear view of the ‘Ring of Fire’, an earthquake belt in the basin of pacific ocean.

Beyond natural disasters, it’s also worth looking into earthquakes caused by nuclear bombs.

seismic activity from nuclear bombs in 1960s-1990s. Icon from http://www.flaticon.com/free-icon/radiation_195741#term=radioactivity&page=1&position=20
seismic activity from nuclear bombs in 1960s-1990s. Icon from http://www.flaticon.com/free-icon/radiation_195741#term=radioactivity&page=1&position=20

The number of ghastly nuclear bombs that was tested simply surprised me. As the data only covers till 1965, those earlier activities such as Hiroshima were not included.

What I learnt today:

  • Leaflet map is cool but leaflet.extras package simply adds to the awesomeness, with functions like addWebGLHeatmap and addDrawToolBar.
  • there are several method to map geocoordinates to countries. However, for this dataset, many datapoints are in the ocean and won’t be mapped to country.

This is #day11 of my #100dayprojects. Full code on my github. Thanks for reading.


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