Earthquakes - Magnitude, Depth & The 5 Biggest From 12/29/19 - 1/28/20
I was curious about what relationships I could find with different information about earthquakes. So I went to a standard for collecting information, the United States Government. From here, I was able to obtain information about earthquakes that ranged from December 29th, 2019 to January 28th, 2020. As of now, they have even more recent information, but this is what I collected when I got it on January 28th.
After manipulating the data to the way I wanted it, I was able to easily count that there were 11,961 earthquakes recorded during that 30-day time frame. That many earthquakes all around the world equate to just over 398 earthquakes per day. That’s insane! Granted, a large majority of them were not significant. As in, they likely weren’t even felt by humans. There were 9,309 earthquakes with less than a 2.5 magnitude. That’s 77.82% of quakes.
This is what the earthquakes look like for the month mentioned above. Thousands of earthquakes fall within the range between 0 and 2.5 magnitude.
Does the depth of an earthquake matter? Not really. The graph below may seem a little bit misleading if
you were trying to measure the depth versus magnitude. However, if you take into account the fact that
there are fewer earthquakes as magnitude increases, there’s less information to get because there’s less quakes.
For example, the 8.0 earthquake in Peru during 2019
measured a depth of 122 kilometers, and the
9.0 Japan quake in 2011 was 29 kilometers deep. It’s important to remember the following are the averages of each
starting with earthquakes in the 2.5 to 3.0 magnitude range. And know, I’ve dropped the earthquakes less than 2.5 magnitude because I was interested in the ones people would be more likely to feel and to make sure I didn’t get any seismic activity from things like quarry blasts and mining.
The 5 biggest quakes from December 29th, 2019 to January 28th, 2020
Where are the biggest five are earthquakes located? Thanks to the USGS site providing all kinds of information about them, I was able to plot the coordinates of the five highest magnitude quakes.
This skill took me a substancial amount of time to learn, but in all it’s beauty here is a showing of the 5 biggest quakes that finished out the year 2019 and shook in the year 2020.
My Github For This Project
Where I got my data.
My sample I used.