Guest User

Tokyo Shift

The future is now in the land of the rising sun

by Rick Martin, Japan

Subscribe to this blog

Visualizing earthquake data

Aug 28, 2009 22:32

Before moving to Japan, I had never experienced an earthquake. But over the last few months I've felt Tokyo shift under my feet more times than I'd care to count. At this point I've become almost desensitized to quakes, typically polling my Twitter friends when an earthquake hits to figure out if I need to put on pants or not. Obviously, that is not the correct emergency response...

For those who want to read up on how to stay one step ahead of seismic activity, check out Joseph Tame's post describing how you can get early warning telephone alerts whenever a pre-quake P-wave is detected. I'm not sure how this differs from the Yure Project, but it's certainly good to know that we have at least a small headstart to prepare for a quake.

Usually, once an earthquake has subsided we all jump online to check out the magnitude, or to make sure family and friends are ok. The USGS (United States Geological Survey) and the JMA (Japan Meteorological Agency) are two of the best sources of earthquake data. Twitter is a good source of real-time updates from real people, and for that reason it's one of the first places that people go to see what's up.

One new service, QuakeSpotter.com, has done a good job combining these two information sources to create an pretty slick visual representation of seismic activity around the globe. Recent quakes are marked by concentric circles, and you can click through to the USDC page about that particular seismic event, or you can also view Twitter messages posted about it.

For the time being, QuakeSpotter is only a downloadable app. But it is open source, which means anyone can mess with the source code and produce their own variation. I'd be curious to see if anyone tries plugging in the JMA data because I'm pretty sure they're a little speedier than the USGS for Japan.

Are there any other interesting quake-monitoring tools that I'm missing? Let me know in the comments, or drop me a line.

h/t to Chris Amico for the QuakeSpotter link. Much appreciated!
/p>

« Prev

Report offensive

Talkback

There are currently no comments for this post.

About Rick Martin

After a few years in China studying Mandarin and watching the Chinese Tech scene, Rick Martin has escaped to Japan and is loving every minute of it. When he's not working on his pet projects, 2JPN and DS Ninja, he can usually be found exploring all things tech in the land of the rising sun. Drop him a line on Twitter, Facebook, or contact him via Email.