The deadly Christchurch earthquake has been mapped from space.



Data from the Japanese Alos spacecraft has been used to show the way the ground moved during the February 22 quake.



The map was made by combining radar images from an orbiting satellite before and after the quake, and shows the focus of the tremor was under the city's south-eastern suburbs.



The BBC reported that the coloured bands represent movement towards or away from the spacecraft. The highest movement towards the satellite was 50cm.



Where the rainbow fringes are most tightly spaced is where the quake came closest to the surface.



"It's like a contour map but it's showing to the south-east of Christchurch that the ground motion is towards Alos. That's uplift," Oxford University's Dr John Elliott told the BBC.



"And then right under Christchurch, we see subsidence. That's partly due to liquefaction but it's mainly due to the way the Earth deforms when you snap it like an elastic band," said Elliott, from the university's Centre for the Observation and Modelling of Earthquakes and Tectonics.