A Real-Time Map of Earthquakes Around the World

More than 9,509 tremors have been felt worldwide in the past month; 1,789 in the past week; and 192 in the past 24 hours. And these numbers may have risen by the time you read this story.

When a new earthquake is recorded by any monitoring station around the world, it shows up on this new real time map, created by Mapbox using USGS earthquake data feed. The dots on the map represents the points at which the tremors were detected, and the size of the halos around them correspond with the magnitude of the underlying earthquakes.

Here’s Mapbox designer, Peter Liu, pointing out the striking patterns in the distribution and the magnitude of earthquakes within the past month (pictured in the map below) in a recent blog post:

Check out the tight clusters of minor earthquakes in Alaska and California, and sparser but far more powerful shocks on the Ring of Fire’s western edge.

A panel on the left of the map lists the latest, strongest, and most reported tremors for the unit of time (a month, a week, or a day) analyzed. In the past month, for example, the strongest quake was born several miles northeast of an uninhabited cluster of islands near Argentina, and measured 7.2 on the Richter scale. Although there were reports of aftershocks in Argentina and the Falkland Islands, this earthquake was ultimately not powerful enough to cause a tsunami or have a large impact on the nearest humans. In second place was an earthquake measuring 6.6, off the coast of Indonesia:

The earthquake that was most strongly felt by peopleon the ground in the past month was among a dense cluster of tremors around Borrego Springs, California. It was 5.2 on the Richter scale:

Let’s the just hope that by the time the next “big one” shows up on this map, our cities are a bit more prepared to handle it.