This is really cool, both for the content and for the sheer beauty of the image itself.

You’re looking at the latest work of John Nelson, who is becoming well known for combining natural-disaster data with brilliant visualizations. The Michigan-based designer first captured our attention with a series of fantastic maps of U.S. tornado data. Now, he’s used his talents to chart a century’s worth of earthquakes (a staggering 203,186 of them) across the globe.

You can clearly see the “ring of fire” around the Pacific rim and the other tectonic plate boundaries. Very cool!

Read the article here and be sure to follow the link in the article to the high-res version of the image and be prepared to be wowed.

FreeInKy - 06 July 2012 06:55 PM

This is really cool, both for the content and for the sheer beauty of the image itself.

You’re looking at the latest work of John Nelson, who is becoming well known for combining natural-disaster data with brilliant visualizations. The Michigan-based designer first captured our attention with a series of fantastic maps of U.S. tornado data. Now, he’s used his talents to chart a century’s worth of earthquakes (a staggering 203,186 of them) across the globe.

You can clearly see the “ring of fire” around the Pacific rim and the other tectonic plate boundaries. Very cool!

Read the article here and be sure to follow the link in the article to the high-res version of the image and be prepared to be wowed.

That said, Nelson says he’s been surprised at the excitement that his maps have generated, “particularly since there is nothing really new about the data,” which he acquired from publicly accessible databases maintained by NASA, USGS and NCEDC.

Was this supposed to be an animation showing earthquake events over time?  I just got the one image?

You got it right. It’s not an animation—just a single image that graphically shows where the earthquake activity has occurred.

Good find.  It looks like the Pacific rim is very active compared to the world.  And that the Atlantic rim is away from the activity in the middle of the Atlantic region, and still that is less powerful than the Pacific Ring of Fire.