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Hand drawn chart of aftershock intensity Chris McDowall Sep 06

9 Comments

Mike Dickison, from the excellent Pictures of Numbers information design blog, has been working with GeoNet’s seismic data. This morning Mike asked the Internet “has anyone produced a graph of all the aftershocks and their intensity over the past two days?” It seemed that nobody had, so he created his own … by hand.

The figure below is a scanned copy of Mike’s bar graph of aftershocks following the large quake. Note the tall line at the far left of the chart. That is not the Y axis – that’s the big one.

A chart created with actual graph paper is a rare and wonderful thing. This made my day.

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• Post Tags:
• chart
• christchurch
• data
• earthquakes

9 Comments Leave a comment

1. 
   DavidW 625 days ago

   I always understood the Richter Scale to be exponential. As such should there be equal spacing on the Y axis?

2. 
   Luis 625 days ago

   It is logarithmic; there should be equal spacing on the Y axis but moving one point feels a lot stronger. I put together another plot (looking more like a time series) here.

3. 
   Ross 624 days ago

   I asked a question yesterday about possible “strings” of earthquakes being seen in a movie. Heh. I have to say, looks like strings or clusters to me occuring in there! I realise one has to be careful about randomness V clustering ….but…It will be interesting to see the movie!

4. 
   kiwiski 624 days ago

   A similar graph is available on wolframalpha.com (type “christchurch earthquake” in the query field).
   http://www.christchurchquake.map.co.nz is also an interesting way to look at it.

5. 
   Dave Ingram 623 days ago

   I made some of these charts, and update them daily. This one is from the 6th (http://twitpic.com/2lqqbu) and this is from today around lunchtime (http://twitpic.com/2m8yr2).

   Looks like we had exactly the same idea. I’m using the GeoNet data and R to graph it.

6. 
   Chris McDowall 623 days ago

   @Dave. Very nice. R is such a great package. I would love to see any more stuff that you do.

7. 
   Sue Galvin 619 days ago

   Leave your comment here…
   Dear Mike, I have been looking for a graph like this all week – have you found, or can you do another one for the rest of the week, or tell us how to get the data – geonet and christchurchquake only show some of the data at once.

8. 
   Chris McDowall 619 days ago

   @Sue You can find a graph for the entire week here: http://twitpic.com/2mvekr/full This chart was created by Dave Ingram who commented above.
   If you want the raw data that Mike and Dave used to create their chart, you can get it here: http://magma.geonet.org.nz/resources/quakesearch/
   (Note: the time stamps in the raw data are provided in the UTC time standard – you will probably want to convert it to NZ standard time.)

9. 
   robert day 439 days ago

   has anyone done a chart location an depth 3d type