Category Archives: Earthquakes

SeisMac and Quake-Catcher Network – turn your mac into a seismograph

Occasionally, I get to find very interesting scientific apps for the Mac. In light of the recent events, SeisMac is definitely one of those. While not technically useful for the general public, it is a very important application for research. All Mac laptops include the so-called Sudden Motion Sensor, a Micromechanical system (MEMS) accelerometer. This [...]

Plotting seismic events in Japan in 2D and 3D

I just saw this very interesting and shocking movie reporting the quakes rattling Japan from 9th to 14th of March. The amount of events after the big one, at 1:17, is devastating. I wanted to see more, adding the third dimension. I tinkered with wget, bash, gnuplot and ffmpeg to produce this less visually appealing [...]

The Japanese quake

Yesterday around 14.30 a big quake hit the Sendai area in Japan, followed by a tsunami and a contiguous stream of additional shocks. I immediately contacted friends in Tokyo and they are all fine. Transportation in Tokyo is interrupted, and so is communication. I don’t know any more details. I just have news from a [...]

Large quake occurs near Chile.

A magnitude 8.8 quake occurred in Chile. A tsunami warning has been issued. Very good details, and a map of the predicted height of the tsunami across all the pacific can be found at Phil Plait’s blog. Apparently, Japan is not concerned about the Tsunami, which should hit around 3 AM GMT (12AM Japanese time). [...]