Earthquakes Over the Past 7 Days

This is a brief example using the maps in R and to highlight a source of data.  This is real-time data and it comes from the U.S. Geological Survey.  This shows the location of earthquakes with magnitude of at least 1.0 in the lower 48 states.

library(maps)
library(maptools)
library(rgdal)

eq = read.table(file=”http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/catalogs/eqs7day-M1.txt”, fill=TRUE, sep=”,”, header=T)
plot.new()
my.map <- map("state", interior = FALSE, plot=F) x.lim <- my.map$range[1:2]; x.lim[1] <- x.lim[1]-1; x.lim[2] <- x.lim[2]+1; y.lim <- my.map$range[3:4]; y.lim[1] <- y.lim[1]-1; y.lim[2] <- y.lim[2]+1; map("state", interior = FALSE, xlim=x.lim, ylim=y.lim) map("state", boundary = FALSE, col="gray", add = TRUE) title("Magnitude 1+ Earthquakes Over the Past 7 Days") eq$mag.size <- NULL eq$mag.size[eq$Magnitude>=1 & eq$Magnitude<2] <- .75 eq$mag.size[eq$Magnitude>=2 & eq$Magnitude<3] <- 1.0 eq$mag.size[eq$Magnitude>=3 & eq$Magnitude<4] <- 1.5 eq$mag.size[eq$Magnitude>=4] <- 2.0 eq$mag.col <- NULL eq$mag.col[eq$Magnitude>=1 & eq$Magnitude<2] <- 'blue' eq$mag.col[eq$Magnitude>=2 & eq$Magnitude<3] <- 'green' eq$mag.col[eq$Magnitude>=3 & eq$Magnitude<4] <- 'orange' eq$mag.col[eq$Magnitude>=4] <- 'red' points(x=eq$Lon,y=eq$Lat,pch=16,cex=eq$mag.size, col=eq$mag.col) eq$magnitude.text <- eq$Magnitude eq$magnitude.text[eq$Magnitude<4] <- NA text(x=eq$Lon,y=eq$Lat,col='black',labels=eq$magnitude.text,adj=c(2.5),cex=0.5) legend('bottomright',c('M 1-2','M 2-3','M 3-4','M4+'), ncol=2, pch=16, col=c('blue','green','orange','red')) box() [/sourcecode]

Posted in Uncategorized

6 replies on “Earthquakes Over the Past 7 Days

  1. Very, very cool stuff. I was playing with your code to look at sales numbers at my company and visualization is definitely more insightly than State groupings. Thank you for sharing!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.