You are browsing the archive for visualization Archives - The Trembling Earth.
January 29, 2015
A haunting 8-day-long orchestration of modern seismicity
We’re getting ever-richer ways to “view” the seismic restlessness of our planet, from this beautiful map of all the tremors we’ve recorded, and this sparkling NOAA animation of quakes in the past decade (or the last year), to the of tympanic drama of individual earthquake sequences. At the same time, artists find inspiration for performance in the fundamental natural rhythms of the planet, staging ballets and concerts backed with live seismic recordings, and composing music derived from seismograms …
October 21, 2013
Watch the whole U.S. ripple
Want to see what happens to the ground in the United States when an earthquake snaps the crust elsewhere in the world? The waves ripple outward through the continent oscillating each county and city in turn. This video shows real data from seismometers deployed across the country. Each dot represents a seismometer. Each instrument’s motion is displayed here as alternating red (for upward motion) and blue (for downward motion). Individually …
June 2, 2013
Danse de la Terre
Last week marked 100 years since the debut of my favorite piece of music of all time: Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The ballet debuted to a legendary amount of controversy, but its cacophonous, haunting beauty has been recreated and rechoreographed countless times in the past century, including for example this 1975 Pina Bausch version of the culminating “Sacrificial Dance,” which I’m pretty certain forms the main inspiration for the 1983 Thriller …
June 23, 2011
The UC Davis KeckCAVES and earthquake studies
I am privileged to be able to conduct much of my research using an immersive 3D data visualization facility housed by UC Davis. I link there to a clip of the Holodeck from Star Trek because that’s pretty much what this facility is, and I’ve got videos of it below. The future is here; see for yourself. The KeckCAVES (Center for Active Visualization in the Earth Sciences, or “the Cave” as we …
March 12, 2011
Animation of Japan quake traversing the U.S.
The data-consolidating institutional consortium IRIS–the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology–has a spectacular resource to visualize actual seismic waves propagating around the Earth, that everyone should check out. Here is an animation they put together (they do this for every significant quake) displaying ground motion at recording stations set up around the U.S. You can see the dramatic passage of the seismic waves from the 8.9 quake, and you get glimpses …
