The United States Geological Survey (USGS) is responsible for providing scientific data about natural hazards, the health of our ecosystems and environment, and the impacts of climate and land-use change. Their scientists develop new methods and tools to supply timely, relevant, and useful information about the Earth and its processes. The USGS is interested in building a new set of tools that will allow them to visualize their earthquake data. They collect a massive amount of data from all over the world each day, but they lack a meaningful way of displaying it. In this project, I built a map to visualize USGS data which could be a useful resource for educating the public and other government organizations on issues facing our planet.
The USGS provides earthquake data in a number of different formats, updated every 5 minutes. For this visualization, I used seismic activity in magnitude and depth for the last 7 days. The data can be found here.
I imported and visualized the data in GeoJSON format using Leaflet library and then created a map that plots all the earthquakes over the past one week based on their longitude and latitude. Since the data are frequently updated, the visualization is in real time. Some important features of this visualization inlucde the color markers, size markers, legends and a tooltip showing the Magnitude, the location and depth for any selected point. The data markers reflects the magnitude of the earthquake by their size and the depth of the earthquake by color. Earthquakes with higher magnitudes would therefore appear larger, and earthquakes with greater depth should appear darker in color. Other features of the map include a popups that provide additional information about the earthquake when its associated marker is clicked. To aid visualization, I also created a legend that provides context for the map data.
- Fig 1:Snapshot of seismic activity over the last seven days
Deployed to Github pages to view.
Dataset created by the United States Geological Survey.