A swarm of thousands of earthquakes have been recorded on Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula over the past three weeks. It’s a strong indication that a volcanic eruption is imminent. The town of Grindavík has been evacuated as a result. The Icelandic Meteorological Office has a page with updates and maps of earthquakes and ground deformation from the magmatic intrusion (examples above). A post on Earthquake Insights has more maps, plus geological and historical context.
Every two years or so, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information updates poster maps based on its Global Historical Tsunami, Significant Earthquake and Significant Volcanic Eruption databases; the 2022 editions are now available. The posters, made in collaboration with the International Tsunami Information Center, are distributed to emergency response personnel; they provide a historical overview of where earthquakes or eruptions took place, or tsunami originated, going back literally millenia. The maps can be downloaded in PDF format: Significant Earthquakes 2150 B.C. to A.D. 2022, Tsunami Sources 1610 B.C. to A.D. 2022, and Significant Volcanic Eruptions 4360 B.C. to A.D. 2022.
This interferogram shows the ground displacement caused by last week’s earthquakes in southern California. Produced by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it’s based on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images from JAXA’s ALOS-2 satellite taken both before (16 April 2018) and after (8 July 2019) the earthquakes. Each colour cycle represents 12 centimetres (4.8 inches) of ground displacement.
The Washington Post maps disasters in the United States, with a page that shows maps of flood warnings, tornadoes and hurricanes, extreme heat and cold (see above), wildfires, lightning, and earthquakes and volcanoes. In the wake of a natural disaster there’s usually someone suggesting that the victims are at fault for living in a disaster zone. The WaPost’s maps have an answer to that: “It turns out there is nowhere in the United States that is particularly insulated from everything.”
Last week a magnitude-7.5 earthquake struck the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, triggering a tsunami that struck the city of Palu with far more force than expected. The New York Times has multiple maps and aerial images of the damaged areas; NASA Earth Observatory has before-and-after Landsat imagery.
Charlie Mitchell has made a time-lapse map showing earthquakes in New Zealand over the past decade (January 2008 to December 2017), scaled by magnitude. On Twitter he explains that he excluded earthquakes less than 3.0 magnitude but still ended up with around 20,000 of them. Simple, without a lot of supporting information, but effective.
This crowdsourced map of collapsed and damaged buildings in Mexico City (in Spanish) appeared shortly after the 7.1-magnitude earthquake hit central Mexico on 19 September [via]. NASA also produced a map, based on radar data from the ESA’s Copernicus satellites that compared the state of the region before and after the quake. Interestingly, the data was validated against the crowdsourced map.
The New York Times produced maps showing the pattern of damage in Mexico City and the extent and severity of earthquake shaking (the Times graphics department’s version of the quake’s Shake Map, I suppose) as well as how Mexico City’s geology—it was built on the drained basin of Lake Texcoco—made the impact of the quake much worse.
Where Disaster Strikes: Modern Space and the Visualization of Destruction, an exhibition of disaster maps, is taking place now until 19 April at Harvard’s Pusey Library.
Floods, fires, earthquakes, volcanoes, bombings, droughts, and even alien invasions: disaster can take many forms. And, although disasters are always felt dramatically, a disaster’s form and location impacts who records its effects and what forms those records take. “Where Disaster Strikes” investigates the intertwined categories of modern space and disaster through the Harvard Map Collection’s maps of large destructive events from the London Fire to the present.
Open to the public. The exhibition also has a substantial online presence.
The Smithonian’s Earthquakes, Eruptions and Emissions interactive map “is a time-lapse animation of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes since 1960. It also shows volcanic gas emissions (sulfur dioxide, SO2) since 1978 — the first year satellites were available to provide global monitoring of SO2.” [Axis Maps]
For the first time, USGS forecast maps that measure the potential damage from earthquakes in the coming year now include human-induced earthquakes, such as those caused by hydraulic fracking. (Oklahoma looms large for that very reason.) Maps for the western U.S., where a different methodology is used, presume that all earthquakes are natural in that region. [Max Galka]
CBC News has an interactive map of all earthquakes in Canada since 1980 that were higher than magnitude 4.0. The page also has a map of fault lines in British Columbia.
