GIS

Update on New Scientific Research of Earthquake Hazards to Seattle

Art Frankel and Craig Weaver of the U.S. Geological Survey gave a presentation to the Seattle City Council on Monday (as noted in this agenda) that has raised some eyebrows – and reaffirms our sensitivity to upcoming seismic disturbances. See their PowerPoint presentation or read on for a few copies of a few of their slides.

Video-- 2011 Earthquakes Worldwide–Plotted with Magnitudes

Video– 2011 Earthquakes Worldwide–Plotted with Magnitudes

Earthquakes Maps Updated–For Eastern US

Thanks to the NY Times for noting the first update to eastern US earthquake maps in almost a quarter century. Sad that it was apparently only done to spur permitting of nuclear power plants.

Do you know Washington’s four kinds of earthquake sources?

Cascadia Subduction Zone
Example: the 1700 earthquake that caused shaking and a tsunami that inundated the Oregon coast and reached as far as Japan.

New Fault Lines Revealed in Washington State

Two new articles from the Homeland Security Newswire and the Yakima Herald discuss new fault lines (maybe better described as extended and remapped fault lines) that the U.S. Geological Survey’s Brian Sherrod has been studying. It is too early to not consequences for these and the discovery doesn’t inherently up the likelihood for quakes, but will make future predictions more accurate and does expand our understanding of the mechanisms at work underground – where real faults are much more complex than simple two dimensional lines on a map. Click on the map to the right to see several views of the newly unveiled faults.

Paul Nichols’ Time Lapse Quake Maps

If you’ve not come across them, Paul Nichols has created several time lapse earthquake maps. Working at the University of Canterbury's Digital Media Group, he takes USGS or GeoNet data and plots it using the Google Maps API to create a fascinating animation.

Crowd Sourcing and Crisis Mapping

  You’ve no doubt heard about volunteers across the globe helping assist with Haitian, Libyan, and other crises by crowd sourcing: geolocating and tagging new reports and data from a wide variety of news sources like phones, web forms, tweets, email and more. By filtering for keywords and locating these reports on a map, a wide variety of emergency managers, researchers, and citizens can rapidly get a better feeling for late breaking information – well before a reporter or others have had time to synthesize the data into a summary or overview.

Quake shifts Japan 13’ East

“This week's earthquake caused the main island of Japan to shift as much as 13 feet to the east, seismologists say. That may sound like a shocker, but it's just one of the natural changes that come along with an 8.9-magnitude temblor — like the 1.6-microsecond speed-up of Earth's daily rotation and the 4-inch shift in Earth's axis.”

Pacific NW Explores virtual USA for Situational Awareness and Continuity of Operations

The Pacific Northwest is exploring solutions that can provide officials an overview of a regional event.

Seattle Faults

If you’ve not seen it, there is a good map of local faults, with a brief write-up at www.pnsn.org/INFO_GENERAL/puget_faults.html