Student creates a new way of looking at earthquakes

If you’re curious about the history of earthquakes you may want to check out an interactive map created by UVic doctoral student Lars Grammel (computer science). By using an online visualization toolkit “Choosel” that he created for his PhD research, Grammel has produced an online map that plots all of the earthquakes since 1900 in which a thousand or more people have been killed.

You can view this information by continent, magnitude, number of casualties and decade. Many of the mapped earthquakes are also linked to a Wikipedia site with photos and other details.

“After the tragic earthquake happened in Japan last month, I searched the web for information about earthquakes and came about a blog post where someone analyzed where and when those devastating earthquakes occur,” Grammel explains. “The blog post contained only pictures and text, and I thought it would be interesting to have an interactive online visualization that people could explore on their own.”

View Grammel’s http://earthquakevisualization.appspot.com/http://earthquakevisualization.appspot.com/ (the visualization does not work in Internet Explorer).