Category Archives: Catalog Movies

7 years in Japan (Tohoku Eq, 2011)

This movie shows earthquakes from Japan larger than Magnitude 3.5 (more than 10,000 events), in the years between Jan. 1, 2008 – Dec. 31, 2014. The Magnitude 9.0 Tohoku-oki earthquake was on March 11, 2011 (note the title bar in the movie says 2012, which is incorrect!). This is the same time window and distance in latitude (but not longitude) as the movie on the Caribbean and Haiti M7.0 earthquake: Haiti: vimeo.com/153547570. The dot size is (non-linearly) proportional to magnitude and the color is proportional to depth according to these rules:
Key: vimeo.com/153547572 .
The sound is generated by adding to the sound track tiny earthquake sounds, as described by that link.
The data comes from the ANSS catalog of the US Geological Survey, accessible from here: quake.geo.berkeley.edu/anss/catalog-search.html

Ben Holtzman, Douglas Repetto, Jason Candler, Nolan Lem. CC licence seismicsoundlab.org .

7 years in the Caribbean (Haiti eq., 2010)

This movie shows earthquakes in the Caribbean region larger than Magnitude 3.5 (about 8,000 events), in the years between Jan. 1, 2008 – Dec. 31, 2014. The Magnitude 7.0 Haiti earthquake was on January 12, 2010. This movie covers same time window and distance in latitude (but not longitude) as the movie on the Japan region and Tohoku Mag9.0 earthquake: vimeo.com/153547571.
The dot size is (non-linearly) proportional to magnitude and the color is proportional to depth according to these rules:
Key: vimeo.com/153547572 .
The sound is generated by adding to the sound track tiny earthquake sounds, as described by that link.
The data comes from the ANSS catalog of the US Geological Survey, accessible from here: quake.geo.berkeley.edu/anss/catalog-search.html

Ben Holtzman, Douglas Repetto, Jason Candler, Nolan Lem. CC licence seismicsoundlab.org .

The Key to Catalog Movies

 

An earthquake “catalog” is the list of time, location, magnitude, depth and other parameters describing the energy released by the earthquake. We generate dots and synchronous sounds marking each event, to generate movies with soundtracks for a region and time window, such as these:
Tohoku: vimeo.com/153547571
Haiti: vimeo.com/153547570
The sounds for each earthquake magnitude are sampled from small aftershocks of sonified data from the Mag6.6 Niigata, Japan earthquake of 2007. With increasing depth, we filter out increasing amounts of high frequency energy to give the impression of attenuation of waves as they travel from greater depths in the earth towards the surface where they are recorded.

Ben Holtzman, Douglas Repetto, Jason Candler, Nolan Lem CC seismicsoundlab.org

Seismicity in Nepal

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We have just produced a movie of seismicity (earthquake patterns in space and time) in the region of the Himalaya centered on Nepal, to demonstrate the context for the recent M7.8 earthquake on April 25, 2015, that had terrible consequences for many many people. This movie represents 42 years of seismicity in the Nepal region, with all earthquakes above M3.5 (from the ANSS catalog). The size of each dot represents the magnitude, while the color scales with depth; blue indicates shallow upper crust, increasing to purple, then red and then orange (the “Key” is here ). The orange earthquakes are > 50 km, and are mostly in the subducting plate. The lack of earthquakes to the west of the April 25th, 2015 earthquake and its aftershocks indicates a potentially elevated risk in that region. The sounds are generated from a library of tiny earthquake sounds (“granules”) that we created.