Cumulative Earthquake Activity from 1980 through 1995 (WMS)

  • Released Wednesday, February 11, 2004
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This animation shows a cumulative view of earthquake activity for the whole world from 1980 through 1995. Each dot on the image represents the number of earthquakes with magnitude greater than 4.2 that have occurred in a 0.35 by 0.35 degree area of the globe since January 1, 1980. A yellow dot represents 1 or 2 earthquakes, an orange dot represents about 10 earthquakes, and a red dot represents 50 to 200 earthquakes. The background image, if present, shows the topography of the ocean floor. As the animation proceeds, the earthquakes clearly accumulate around the topographic features that represent the boundaries of the Earth's crustal plates. This animation is based on data from world-wide seismic networks and was obtained from the National Earthquake Center of the United States Geological Survey.

This animation shows earthquake activity over a 16-year period.

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This animation shows earthquake activity over a 16-year period over a map of tectonic plate boundaries and ocean bathymetry.
This video is also available on our YouTube channel.

Legend for the earthquake animation

Legend for the earthquake animation

Legend for plate boundaries.

Legend for plate boundaries.

For More Information

See http://neic.usgs.gov

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Scientific Visualization Studio

This page was originally published on Wednesday, February 11, 2004.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:56 PM EDT.

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Datasets used

Note: While we identify the data sets used on this page, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.