Massive Earthquake Hammers China

A series of massive Earthquakes hammered China this morning, the largest of which registered 7.8 on the Richter scale.

How big is 7.8? The image below from my Earthquake map mashup shows that the 'rumble zone' (the area over which the quake could be felt) covered all of China.


There's been over a dozen after-shocks registering over 5, so the 'impact' zone is harder to view, but if you look at the 'Australia' tab they're only showing the largest quake which gives a better idea of its scale.

For comparisons sake the 'damage zone' (the area susceptible to severe damage) covers an area about the size of Ohio or Austria. In the image below it's represented by the darker red circle about the size of Thailand.


The humanitarian result of a quake of this size is predictable. You can read more about the effect of a quake of magnitude at Google News.

Massive 7.9 Earthquake Hits Sumatra

A massive earthquake registering 7.9 on the Richter scale has been recorded just off the coast of Sumatra in Indonesia.

Earthquake! illustrates the size and scale of the quake, the light red 'felt' region extends over much of south east Asia as far away as Sri Lanka and Myanmar and the dark red damage zone covering a fair chunk of the Sumatran coast line.

There's currently a Tsunami alert in effect for the surrounding region.

Earthquake! With Damage and Rumble Radii

I visited the Natural History Museum in New York earlier this year and was seriously impressed by the real-time earthquake display. Despite my earnest pleas they cruelly refused to let me take it home with me; instead I stole copied created my own version of their concentric circle filled goodness.

Like the exhibit that inspired it, Worldwide Earthquakes shows not just the epicentres, but also an approximated 'damage zone' (inner circle, dark shading) and 'felt zone' (outer circle, thick border) to give an impression of the areas likely to be affected by each earthquake. Zoom in to see which cities and suburbs will feel the tremor, and which are at risk for property damage.


Red circles show quakes within the last 24 hours, yellow are within the last two days, and grey are everything that's left (up to the last 2 months).

As a bonus, unlike the IRIS/USGS display at the museum, I use multiple data sources to get better world-wide coverage. I include feeds from the Geoscience Australia, the US Geological Survey (USGS), and the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre.

Big quakes (>5) should be picked up by all the agencies -- but in any case, I've mashed up all three feeds to produce the 'World' tab that shows only earthquakes that people can feel (>3).

Now, if you've got a 30" plasma, you can have you own 'at home' real-time earthquake display. How sweet is that?

Note. The Worldwide Earthquake mashup was constructed using Google's Mashup Editor, with additional data processing done using Yahoo Pipes. Read more information on using Pipes to help construct mashups with GME.

UPDATE (10/08/07): Fixed for IE, circles now draw properly in IE (yay!)