Being in an earthquake is no fun. Everything that’s supposed to be solid (like walls and the ground itself) becomes something unfamiliar, rumbling, and dangerous. And while we still can’t predict when earthquakes will occur, at least the United States Geological Survey’s animated earthquake maps will tell me where not to live. Sorry south-central Alaska, I just can’t risk it.

The maps show different boxes for intensity and varying colors to indicate when the tremor occurred and update as earthquakes happen. Pay special attention to the aberrations: who knew Bar Harbor, Maine was such a hot spot?

One of the great changes in user interaction of the automobile age was getting a population to use, understand, and follow maps just as well as they knew a train schedule. Maybe in this Post-Industrial Revolution, it’s no longer about using maps as much as creating them to describe your own world.

Link via USGS

Link to Google Earth kml of the earthquakes

Popularity: 4% [?]

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See Also: Sad Google Maps Hack,Star Wars Attacks Google Maps,Google Moon,

This entry was posted by Jeffrey Goodman on Friday, December 22nd, 2006 at 11:27 am and is filed under Design, Environment, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.