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June 13, 2005
¡Terremoto!
Shawn and I have been talking about how we'll be moving back into an earthquake zone when we move to Guadalajara, and with the 7.9 quake that just hit Tarapacá, Chile, I thought some resources on looking up recent seismic activity might be interesting.
I monitor earthquake activity in the Americas through OS X Planet by Gabriel Otte, the Macintosh version of xplanet. The software generates images of planets from user-specified locations and angles, but for me, the interest is in the images of the Earth that it can generate with current day/night projection, real-time cloud maps, earthquakes, city locations and their current UTC time, volcanic activity and major storms. OS X Planet does this by making your Mac desktop your desired projection, so every day, when I sit down at my computer, I can see what major Earth events have happened recently or are happening currently.
When I see that an earthquake has happened, I then go to one of two "worldwide earthquake locator" sites: USGS Recent World Earthquake Activity [text-only list] or The University of Edinburgh. These list the locations of the earthquakes by date, time, location and magnitude.
As Guadalajara is on the western side of the country, you can see that we're going to be in an area with very high "seismic hazard" once we're there.
Posted by crispy at June 13, 2005 06:38 PM
Comments
You can also view an interactive map of the globe with seismograms for the last 24 hour period.
Posted by: Chris Coen at June 15, 2005 12:55 AM