My last post was about the 1960 Chile megathrust earthquake, and how much energy it released (about 1/3 of all seismic energy on earth over the last 100 years). I used data from USGS on all earthquakes greater than magnitude 6 from 1915-2015. Since I had this nice dataset (about 10,500 quakes), I could not resist playing around in CartoDB to make some nice visualizations.

This is an animated map of all earthquakes since 1915 using the Torque function in CartoDB. I know this has been done many times, but it makes such a striking image it’s hard to resist. If you watch closely you’ll notice that the earthquakes seem to occur more frequently towards the end of the time lapse (starting in the 1960s). That’s because seismologists got better at measuring and recording earthquakes, not because the quakes actually became more frequent.

This is a heatmap of all quakes in the dataset. The Pacific ring of fire (the arcs of subduction zones encircling much of the Pacific Ocean) dominates the global pattern. The mid-ocean spreading centers are also visible, but not as pronounced the ring of fire. There are fewer big earthquakes in the extensional spreading centers than the compressional subduction zones. There is also a broad zone of earthquake activity that stretches from Italy and Greece through Asia Minor, Iran, Central Asia, the Himalayas, into China. This is a huge zone of compression caused by the African, Indian, and other small plates colliding with Eurasia.

This map shows earthquake depth, with deep earthquakes in red, intermediate depth in orange, and shallow in yellow. Plotting earthquake depth on a map illustrates the geometry of subduction zones. For example, in South America, the ocean crust of the Nazca plate (under the Pacific Ocean) is subducting under the South American plate. As the Nazca plate plunges eastward at an angle, the earthquakes produced get deeper with distance to the east.

You can pan and zoom right in the embedded maps if you are keen to explore. You can also make the maps full screen using the button on the upper left.